“Our curriculum, therefore, focuses on what to build and how to sustain a competitive advantage. We spend more time examining customer trust, loyalty, distribution and the sources of defensibility, including proprietary data, relationship capital, deep domain expertise and regulatory know-how. We push students to answer a critical question: ‘What happens when a competitor copies the model?’ If they cannot answer it, they do not yet have a business. “Assignments focus on evidence-based assumptions and peer challenges, while the curriculum emphasises strategy, industry analysis, unit economics and governance. Iteration helps entrepreneurs find the right product; differentiation keeps the business alive. “The school’s Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CEI), in collaboration with Minapharm Pharmaceuticals, also brings MBA and biotechnology students together to assess biotech innovations, build business cases and gain insight into Egypt’s pharmaceutical industry.” Maija Renko: “This is something entrepreneurship education needs to rethink. For years, we taught lean startup principles based on the idea that experimentation was costly in time and money. Founders, therefore needed to build a minimum viable product, test assumptions and learn quickly. “Generative AI changes that equation. Building prototypes, creating content, conducting analysis and even launching sophisticated products has become much cheaper and faster. As a result, speed of execution is no longer the advantage it once was. “We need to shift the focus from building quickly to understanding why customers would choose your company in the first place – and why they would keep choosing it when competitors can copy many features. That means helping students think more deeply about differentiation through proprietary knowledge or data, customer relationships, trust, communities and brands.” María del Pilar Lopez Gonzalez: “Generative AI is reducing the time and cost required for ideation, business-model development and prototyping while making entrepreneurial tools more accessible. As a result, speed of execution is becoming less distinctive. The really important questions are: what
“While academic researchers are trained to ask, ‘Is this accurate?’, entrepreneurs ask, ‘Does anyone want to pay for this?’ We address this gap by pairing MBA students with faculty-led research projects and start-ups, asking them to conduct customer interviews, pricing experiments, regulatory mapping and business model design. Students learn that commercialisation is not something that happens at the end of the process; it helps shape the research trajectory itself. Researchers, in turn, gain an early indication of market potential.” With generative AI drastically lowering the barrier to market entry, how should curricula adapt to teach founders true commercial differentiation and long- term staying power rather than merely rapid iteration? Jason Evans: “Generative AI has made many elements of starting a business remarkably accessible. You can develop a prototype, website or competitor analysis incredibly quickly. But if everybody has access to those capabilities, then surely they’re not really a source of competitive advantage? “This means we must move beyond teaching students simply how to start something and focus more on why customers would continue to choose it. This places greater emphasis on skills like judgement, building relationships, having proprietary knowledge and so on. Students need to understand the difference between launching quickly and creating something defensible. “Across our MBA programme, virtually all assignments now ask students to apply principles to organisations and genuine business situations. AI can generate possibilities quickly; our role is increasingly to develop students’ ability to critically evaluate those possibilities.” Sherif Kamel: “Generative AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building a first version of almost anything. An entrepreneur can now develop a working prototype in an afternoon. If everyone can move quickly, however, speed is no longer an advantage.
makes a value proposition difficult to replicate, what evidence shows customers will continue to value it and what can sustain that advantage? “ITESO’s MBA already provides a strong foundation for this shift by integrating innovation and entrepreneurship with strategy, market understanding, finance, operations, sustainability and evidence-based decision-making. If students can generate multiple business models in minutes, the educational value lies in evaluating them: testing assumptions, understanding customers, identifying defensible sources of value and making strategic trade-offs. The challenge is to use AI to accelerate experimentation while placing greater emphasis on judgement, evidence and strategic reasoning.”
22 Ambition • ISSUE 5 • 2026
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