Innovation Blog

 (Lack of) Innovation in B-Schools: Help!!!

By Shlomo Maital

  

 

 

Alan Brandt GMAC

 

Bloomberg Business Week reports on a contest for ideas to innovate business school programs.  There were some 650 entries.    Winner Alice Stewart conceived this idea:    She envisioned professors from different disciplines creating micro-curriculums, where they’d weave content together from business education, engineering, and the sciences.  Students who completed the classes, which she dubbed “stackable knowledge units,” would get a certificate.  Eventually, they could combine these certificates to earn a business degree, she wrote in her proposal, thereby allowing students to customize their education track.

   According to Alan Brandt, who heads the GMAC-funded contest, “This is essentially building your own degree based on creating stackable units. It is something that is different enough and could help you, as an individual student, in approaching a program in the way you want to do it without a wholesale change to the existing way a school is working.”

    As always, I am distressed by the lack of innovation in business schools that teach innovation (all do), because I live and work in a biz-school environment.   My former student B. Joseph Pine,  co-founder of Strategic Horizons, an innovative consulting firm,  published Mass Customization 12 years ago.  In it, he noted the strong trend of ‘markets of one’ – creating customized products for customers.  Many consumer products have done this for year,  for instance Dell Computer Co.’s customized design-it-yourself computers.  Yet MBA programs continue to offer a curriculum of standard functional stovepipe core courses and a few “electives” – mainly, one size fits all.  There is little integration, little cross-disciplinary teaching, little team-teaching (too expensive), little customization.

    When will we see Alice Stewart’s idea truly implemented? At the current snails pace of innovation in B-schools – I may not see true mass customization in MBA programs  in my lifetime.