What Innovation in Business Education Looks Like

When Ziegler took up the post of CIO at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School in September of last year, she published a list of major trends affecting business education. Technology, to a large degree, was a common thread, which has given rise to increased mobility (virtual or otherwise), and opportunities for harnessing technologies to make business education not simply more relevant to business, but more relevant to each individual based on their specific needs and aspirations.

When asked what has changed in the last year, Ziegler says, “not the trends.” Instead, it’s, “how schools are confronting the trends by increasing experimentation and collaboration.” To Ziegler, as the original title of an article she penned on LinkedIn explains, ‘business schools must practice what they preach and teach’. In it, she explains that this means, “exploring greater use of technologies and data analytics that allow for mass personalization of academic programs; studying a growing number of alternative pathways to help people build skills and obtain jobs; and examining opportunities to collaborate among institutions.” 

One approach Kellogg has taken to respond to the needs of the market is to adapt its curriculum (as indeed, we have seen at other leading business schools), by feeding off its knowledge of the increasing complexity of the current business landscape.

“We’ve evolved our curriculum to be more cross-functional, based on the idea that business problems are rarely, if ever, one-dimensional,” Ziegler explains. In order to enable students to study at the horizontal, the vertical, and at the intersection within this matrix (pictured below), the school introduced four ‘strategic initiatives’ a few years ago. These aim to bridge traditional subject areas (marketing, finance, etc.) with the skills Kellogg has identified as essential for an MBA’s future success:  Innovation, collaboration, customer service and public-private interface.

The Kellogg MBA’s 4 strategic initiatives

The idea behind these four lenses is that they provide a way for students, faculty and the school’s partners to look at business problems in a more multifaceted way, while integrating thinking from across academic departments to address emerging business problems in new ways. For example, as part of the Kellogg Markets and Customers Initiative, Kellogg has partnered with other schools at Northwestern to form a collaborative, cross-disciplinary investigation into the subject of trust, a line of inquiry that has gained a great amount of currency across both business and society in recent years. 

Ultimately, this type of collaboration, with its increased exposure to a variety of industry and business needs, can surely only improve the content and delivery of programs, benefitting both students and the business education industry as a whole in the process. It ought also to be good for business.

Some big companies have long turned the crank on innovation with creative approaches to growth and product development, such as by externalizing R&D functions, supporting startups and starting venture funds. Business schools appear to be doing something similar, by increasingly looking outward to collaborate with corporate partners to offer more value to today’s businesses.

Corporations, for their part, are also increasingly looking to business schools to help them better prepare their employees. “Corporate partners not only continue to recruit MBA graduates, but also tap higher education resources to help their employees develop and evolve,” Ziegler explains, citing Arizona State University’s collaboration with Starbucks and AT&T’s employee development partnerships with Georgia Tech, the University of Oklahoma, and Notre Dame. As AT&T’s chief learning officer, John Palmer, has acknowledged, a more cooperative effort is required between corporate and education to better, “build the bridge from business school to business.”  

Ultimately, business schools seek to serve the business community in their mission to prepare the world’s future leaders – for the future. After all, in the words of Ziegler, “to be successful today, we need more education, not less” – and whatever form it takes, business schools can, and should be, at the forefront.