We place a lot of focus on equality, openness, and fairness in our programmes
Cutting-edge technology and associated business-model innovations are not found exclusively in California. Indeed, we are also welcoming quite a few study tours from other Schools to Helsinki, where we can combine academic content with exposure to the unique startup ecosystem that has formed around Aalto University and the great examples of Finnish companies leading digital transformation in their own contexts. In Tehran, we used to have an EMBA programme which we delivered with a local partner, but that had to be discontinued due to unfavourable political and economic developments in recent years. We look forward, one day, to being able to return to working with our friends in Iran and to serving those wonderful participants. How do you believe technology will continue to impact and disrupt the Business School environment? Technology will continue be the driving force impacting the delivery and content of the programmes Business Schools offer. On the delivery side, this means transforming the way we bring content to our audiences – not only in the form of online teaching, but also as it relates to asynchronous elements: videos, online tutorials, and simulations. As geographical boundaries become less important, we can reimagine who our audience is and engage with faculty in entirely new ways. The same also holds true for all other Schools, so the marketplace of Business Schools will look very different in a few years’ time. Regarding the content of our programmes, technology is transforming
of metaphors, but I like to think that it’s our job to be above the curve, as opposed to ahead of it. Especially in the field of technology, some of the industry will always be pushing ahead faster than university research can keep pace – that’s just built into the way we do research. Consultants and ‘technovangelists’ will sell their new solution as the most important discovery for the future. It’s our job to take the 10 thousand foot view, provide context and put new things into perspective. As well as with technology, management fads and pseudo-scientific self-help concepts can make a sudden big splash in business discourse. It’s the role of the Business Schools and their faculty to serve as a filter of the most useless ideas and an emergency break for the most dangerous ones. Is the business education sector as a whole, responding quickly enough to this disruption? Clearly, we’ve been slow to change how we deliver content and embrace technology more broadly. We’ve been talking about digitalisation of the business education sector for decades, but it took a global pandemic to get us to start taking some bigger steps. We’ve made more progress in the past 18 months than in the previous 10 years, but there’s still ways to go and every player in the market will have to find their own way of operating in this more digitised business education sector going forward. But I go back to finding your own voice: for some, the right way to go will be to move fully to online offerings, while others
businesses and the ways businesses operate. Business Schools need to
review the content of their programmes proactively to make sure it is still relevant and valuable. The key is not to think that everything we knew before is now obsolete, rather to gauge carefully how technology has impacted the underlying assumptions and ways of working in different contexts. What innovations is your School developing to future-proof its post-graduate Business programmes? Future-proofing is fundamentally about critically assessing what remains important, what needs to be amended, and what is no longer relevant, as we transition out of the pandemic into whatever the future holds. We have processes in place for ensuring that this is being done for all the core disciplines, such as finance, accounting, and marketing, while simultaneously bringing in larger chunks of new content into our elective portfolio. We’re fortunate that within our organisation, along with our degree programmes, we’re constantly running dozens of customised executive training and development programmes for leading organisations, and reflecting the topics being covered in those against the topics being researched and taught by E/MBA faculty is great way of making sure we don’t miss any important developments. How important is it that Business Schools are ahead of the curve and what more could they be doing? Please excuse the slightly tortured mix
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