The Business School Revolution Nobody Saw Coming

• The next generation of influential business schools may be located not in traditional Western power centers, but in emerging markets where students learn firsthand to manage disruption and contribute to economic growth.
• Even so, the tools most often used to judge quality in business education still reflect Western assumptions about prestige and success, overlooking the research and best practices developed in more challenging contexts.
• Ideas that many schools in the West view as on the cutting edge—such as frugal innovation and constraint-driven sustainability—are often rediscoveries of approaches that have long been embedded in schools in developing markets.

 
Imagine this: A young businesswoman from Nairobi is trying to decide where to get her MBA. She is looking at programs in London, New York, and Singapore, but she is also contemplating her alternatives. Eventually, she decides to go to Mumbai! Not because the program she has chosen is less expensive. Not because she has family there. But because she thinks Mumbai will be the ideal location for her to learn how to develop the kind of business she wants to start.

That scenario would have seemed unlikely five years ago. But today? It’s starting to happen more often than many in business education might realize.

The Quiet Shift Nobody’s Talking About

Something astounding is happening in the world of business education, but most of us aren’t paying attention. The Financial Times (FT) ranked the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad at 27th place in its 2025 global MBA ranking. That puts the school ahead of prominent institutions in Germany and Australia, as well as a few American schools that cost three times as much.

But here’s the thing: This outcome isn’t just about one institution climbing up the league table. It’s about a basic question we should be asking: Shouldn’t business education move with the global economy as that economy moves east and south?

After all, these regions are experiencing significant growth. For instance, India’s gross domestic product (GDP) has risen by more than 7 percent per year in the past few years. Most developed economies only grow by 2 percent to 3 percent each year. China graduates more students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields each year than the U.S. and Europe combined. And Africa’s working-age population is expected to double by 2050.

If in the coming century the most important corporations will be based in India, China, Brazil, and Africa, doesn’t it make sense to train young businesspeople in locations such as Hyderabad, Shanghai, São Paulo, and Johannesburg?

When Rankings Miss the Point

Let’s be honest about the business school rankings. Yes, they exercise formidable influence. Students depend on them to guide their program selections. Recruiters trust them to determine which schools produce the best talent. Business schools view them as an important means to build their reputations. But the rankings have serious flaws.

Think about how rankings usually work. Forty percent of the factors that the FT considers in its ranking are related to graduates’ salaries. Another 20 percent look at how well students do in their careers three years after they graduate. The research output of a school’s faculty counts for 10 percent.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? But when we take a closer look, it really doesn’t.

Cost-of-living indexes show that a graduate in Mumbai who makes 60,000 USD annually has the same buying power as someone in San Francisco who makes 180,000 USD. But the rankings give credit only to the number, not to the real value that salary provides or the quality of life it allows graduates to attain.

Research published in the Academy of Management Journal contributes to a school’s place in the FT rankings, but groundbreaking research in the Indian Journal of Economics bears little to no weight.

Similarly, any research published in the Academy of Management Journal contributes to a school’s place in the rankings. Groundbreaking research in the Indian Journal of Economics that addresses issues confronted by 3 billion individuals? That bears little to no weight, as the FT considers only 50 journals in its rankings. Expanding the list to an FT100 would create space for influential journals from emerging markets—journals such as Vikalpa from IIM Ahmedabad or ISBInsight that produce scholarship directly relevant to the contexts where billions of people live and work.

What if we used a different metric? What if we asked: How many of a school’s graduates are making a difference in their communities by tackling real problems? How often do companies use a school’s research to make important decisions? How well are students learning to lead in the complicated, resource-limited settings where most businesses operate?

Those questions would lead to rankings that looked quite different. When we explore the answers, all of a sudden, schools in Mumbai, Manila, or Mexico City seem far more consequential.

The Advantage Nobody Expected

When we consider other factors—such as the return on investment that students receive for their educations, the impact of faculty’s research, and the difference a school’s graduates make—that’s where business schools in countries like India stand out.

In India, for example, a two-year MBA program costs between 30,000 USD and 50,000 USD, while similar programs in the U.S. cost between 150,000 USD and 200,000 USD. But the real benefit goes beyond cost. The students at these schools don’t treat developing markets like abstractions. They inhabit them!

Think about what this means. To learn about mobile banking, students in London analyze case studies about M-Pesa in Kenya, which handles more than 280 billion USD in transactions each year. Intellectually stimulating, no doubt. But in the end, it’s just another person’s story, seen from afar.

Students in Mumbai learn about mobile banking and see that India’s Unified Payments Interface now processes 21 billion transactions every month. To put this into perspective, that’s nearly double the 13 billion monthly transactions generated each month by all U.S. credit and debit cards combined. These students see the local grocer take digital payments from people who have never had bank accounts. They understand on a deep level how financial technology can skip over decades of building infrastructure, having seen that the percentage of Indians with access to financial accounts has surged from 35 percent in 2011 to 89 percent in 2024.

Similarly, where will students be more inspired to think about how long the planet’s resources will last? Embedding sustainability across all core MBA courses can help students reimagine businesses of the future. In India and other emerging markets, teaching business students about sustainability isn’t a curricular or a nice-to-have option. It’s existential. When water scarcity, energy limitations, and climate impacts are immediate realities rather than abstract projections, sustainability becomes foundational to how business must be conceived and practiced.

In Chennai, India, for instance, many students see firsthand how water scarcity is making it hard for factories to work. In 2019, the city almost ran out of water completely. Likewise, air quality in Delhi often gets severe, which lowers productivity by 10 percent to 15 percent. Climate change might hurt agricultural supply chains that employ 42 percent of India’s workers.

Students in Mumbai understand on a deep level how financial technology can skip over decades of building infrastructure.

These aren’t topics that business students encounter only in their Wednesday afternoon lectures. They’re real problems that the population tackles every single day. 

As climatic disruption intensifies globally, the World Bank forecasts that the effects of climate change might push 132 million additional people into poverty by 2030. Learning to start profitable businesses while dealing with serious environmental problems isn’t going to be elective. It’s going to be fundamental. Institutions that have always worked under these constraints have valuable insights to share.

What Everyone Can Learn

This is where this gets interesting for business education globally. 

For a long time, we’ve taught management as if good business practices were the same for everyone. We tell students, “Do your analysis on Porter’s Five Forces. Make the most of your supply chain. Get the most value for your shareholders.” But most of these frameworks are based on the study of businesses in the U.S. and Europe. We just thought they worked everywhere.

But they don’t. Not always. Not fully.

Business schools located outside Western countries have had to change these frameworks or, in some cases, get rid of them altogether. People in Mumbai, Manila, and São Paulo have had to learn different frameworks out of necessity, and their expertise is becoming increasingly useful everywhere.

When multinational companies enter new markets, they need to understand the factors that drive informal economies. They need to recognize that these economies employ 60 percent of people in developing countries and add about 10 trillion USD to the world’s GDP.

Think about Amul, India’s dairy cooperative that changed the country from a milk importer to the world’s largest milk producer. Founded in 1946, the company now has 3.6 million farmer members who collectively make 6 billion USD a year. Amul has remained profitable for 70 years. That’s stakeholder capitalism working on a huge scale, lifting millions out of poverty. Shouldn’t every business student in the world learn how such a business model works?

Or, look at what Indians term jugaad, which means “frugal innovation.” For example, Aravind Eye Care does 500,000 procedures a year at one-tenth the cost of American hospitals while getting the same results. Physicians at Narayana Health, which specializes in heart surgery, charge only 1,500 USD. Yet, they achieve the same success rates as physicians in the U.S., who charge 75,000 USD to 150,000 USD for the same procedure.

As climate restrictions become more severe and issues of inequality more prominent, the public is calling for more sustainable and inclusive business models. In response, it seems as if everyone is trying to become an expert in frugal innovation! In that case, it makes sense for the world to recognize that the schools that teach this concept out of necessity have something useful to share.

The Question We’re Not Asking

Recognizing the strengths of schools in emerging markets isn’t just about learning from their experience—it’s about acknowledging the legitimacy of their approaches. For the last 50 years, most of the world’s business leaders went to business schools in the U.S. and Europe, including Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, and London Business School. As students, they adopted American and European ideas about the purpose of business and the right way to do things, often without even realizing it.

Then, they went on to change the world economy based on those ideas.

Now, the center of economic power is moving to other parts of the world. According to International Monetary Fund data, emerging and developing economies already account for approximately 60 percent of global GDP measured in Purchasing Power Parity. This trend is expected to remain stable or increase slightly through 2030.

More strikingly, it is estimated that seven of the world’s 10 largest economies, measured by purchasing power parity, will be located in emerging markets. Delhi, Dubai, Jakarta, and Johannesburg are becoming home to the next generation of globally significant businesses.

Do we keep training all students in the same settings, using the same playbooks? Or is it time for our institutions to learn from places we’ve ignored for too long?

India already has more than 100 unicorn firms, each worth more than 1 billion USD. China’s tech sector is as innovative and valuable as Silicon Valley’s. It will become more pertinent for students to study the business strategies and case studies of Haier, BYD, Ant Financial, and TikTok as these organizations challenge the status quo.

Now the question is: Do we really want the next half-century of international business to be presided over by chief executive officers who all attended the same elite universities, relied on the same theoretical frameworks, and had identical worldviews? Wouldn’t it be better if we had a far more pluralist system of business education?

The Real Stakes

In the end, it’s not about which business schools are the most global or how high they are in the rankings. It’s about something much more important. It’s about the fact that the people we now teach in business schools will be in charge of making decisions that affect the lives of billions of people in the 2030s, 2040s, and 2050s.

Those leaders need to understand how complicated and diverse the global economy is. They need systems that work in Lagos and Jakarta, not just London and New York. They need to have dealt with issues such as limited resources, stakeholder complexity, and weak institutions, because those will be the biggest hurdles in their careers.

Do we keep training all students in the same settings, using the same playbooks? Or is it time for business education to go global—for our institutions to strengthen their models through diverse perspectives and learn from places we’ve ignored for too long?

The decisions we make today will not just affect the future of business education. They will change the future of business and the type of world that businesses create.

What kind of future do we want to choose?