economics, law and governance teaching are built to talk to each other from week one, not bolted together at the end. In practice, that meant sustained collaboration between Imperial Business School and Imperial’s Department of Computing early on, at the programme’s design stage. Our director of postgraduate studies in computing Rob Craven and I spent a lot of time working through where the natural connectivity between these disciplines sits. For example, where a technical concept in AI systems has a direct economic, business, legal or policy impact. We then looked at structuring teaching so that students encounter all sides close together rather than months apart. The collaboration with the Department of Computing has been both essential and truly exciting. Computing and economics are different disciplines with different methods, different assessment cultures and at times, different vocabularies for describing the same underlying phenomenon. For instance, a computer scientist and an economist can use the word “risk” in a conversation about AI and mean altogether different things. Getting a shared curriculum to work means getting comfortable translating across that gap constantly and building in enough structured dialogue between teaching teams to ensure that any inconsistencies are caught before they reach students. The other challenge was pacing. Technical AI content and economics/policy content don’t naturally move at the same speed or follow the same logical sequence. Economics teaching tends to build cumulatively from foundational theory, whereas technical AI teaching often needs to move quickly to stay current with a fast-moving field. Reconciling those two rhythms into a single, coherent timetable took more redesign than either department expected. However, what helped was treating the curriculum architecture itself as a joint deliverable, with both departments accountable for the whole programme’s coherence, rather than just their modules. Our inclusion of teaching on law presented a different challenge. While Imperial doesn’t have its own law school, the legal dimension of AI is too important to ignore. We have therefore drawn on leading academic experts in law and technology regulation from outside Imperial to contribute to the legal modules. This allows the programme to combine Imperial’s strengths in computing and economics with specialist expertise in technology law. Again, the point is not simply to add another subject to the curriculum,
but to help students understand how these different perspectives connect. Ensuring nobody is left behind I am often asked about admissions because if you build an integrated curriculum but then admit a cohort that splits cleanly into “the computing people” and “the economics people”, you haven’t really solved the problem, you’ve just relocated it to the seminar room. We deliberately designed our admissions process to draw from a wide range of first degrees: computing, economics, engineering, business and related disciplines. We’re not looking for candidates who already have deep
“We spent a lot of time working through where the natural connectivity between these disciplines sits”
12 Business Impact • ISSUE 5 • 2026
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