The Europe Asia Young Leaders Forum 2003 was a joint initiative of the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), based in Shanghai, and the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, based in Singapore. Approximately 50 young leaders from Asia and Europe gathered from 2 - 5 October 2003 in 'Kloster Irsee' in Southern Germany to participate in the forum. While the majority of the young entrepreneurs, managers, politicians, academics, and journalists from 15 nations met here for the first time, some had attended previous programmes of the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt.

Entitled "The Challenge of Uncertainty", the forum focused on the challenges which an increasingly interdependent and continually changing world posits for corporations and institutions, but especially for individuals.

In an inspiring dialogue with leading academics and business executives, the participants learned about the mechanisms of decision making, discussed how to cope with situations of crisis in business life, and explored different strategies of risk management in Europe and Asia.

The exploration of the conference topic was not limited to the roundtable-discussions, but was also implemented in the networking in nature programme: Divided into four competing teams, the forum participants had to evaluate risks and struggle for the right decisions in order to master a variety of physical and intellectual challenges.