What Is an Innovative Business School?

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024
By embracing adaptability, creativity, and collaboration, business schools can build innovative spaces that prepare students for dynamic challenges.
Featuring Andrew Beer, University of South Australia; Josep Franch, ESADE; Paul Drews, Leuphana University of Lüneburg; and Morris Kalliny, Rowan University
  • Innovative business schools are those that anticipate change, adapt, and influence new directions.
  • Leveraging technology for strategy and learning goals is key to fostering creativity and further encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration.
  • To ensure that students develop strong creativity skills, business schools need to break out of their disciplinary silos and collaborate with complementary fields outside of business.

 
Learn about AACSB's Innovations That Inspire program at aacsb.edu/innovations-that-inspire.

Transcript

Andrew Beer: [0:15] An innovative business school is one that changes with the times, and not only responds to changing conditions, but also shapes that agenda. It looks always to approach the horizon in a positive way and produce the best outcomes for students and its other stakeholders, whether it's in research or in industry or the university as a whole.

Joseph Franch: [0:37] An innovative business school is a school that tries to reinvent itself continuously. The world is spinning faster than ever, and we have to catch up with those changes. Therefore, we need to constantly innovate and reinnovate and question how we teach, how we do research, and how we contribute to the society.

An innovative business school is a school that tries to reinvent itself continuously.

[1:03] Creativity is a key part of it. A business school that innovates is a business school that questions constantly what we are doing and tries to do things differently to catch up with all the changes and to anticipate changes.

Paul Drews: [1:20] An innovative business school today should definitely take technology as a part and incorporate it in part of their strategy and learning goals. We incorporated, for example, information systems and engineering as part of our department. That's, I think, an interesting way, especially when you look at the challenges raised from AI.

Morris Kalliny: [1:41] What an innovative business school means to us. I'm going to talk about the Rohrer College of Business, what we do there. It really means that we break the silos. We go out and get people to collaborate.

Breaking the silos within the business disciplines and bringing those students to work together has been extremely helpful to our students in terms of being creative and being innovative.

[1:53] For us, we have business students who are working with engineers, working with arts, working with education, with different people to be able to bring people together so they are creative in their concepts.

[2:07] You've got business students who have a business idea, but they don't really have the creativity to be able to take that to the market. We've got students from creative arts who come and, basically, help with that.

[2:21] Breaking the silos within the business disciplines and bringing those students to work together has been extremely helpful to our students in terms of being creative and being innovative.


The views expressed by contributors to AACSB Insights do not represent an official position of AACSB, unless clearly stated.
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