The Innovative Business School

Mentoring Today’s Leaders for Tomorrow’s Global Challenges

Daphne Halkias, Michael Neubert, Paul W. Thurman, Chris Adendorff, Sameh Abadir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000286717
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Innovative Business School formulates a blueprint for the innovative business school of the next decade, with proposed areas of innovation which will train executives to transform the coming technological disruptions into an avenue for world economic development and prosperity.

Offering a new model of business education, the book maps the way forward for business school innovators in exploring questions related to innovation and strategy needed on the part of academic and industry leaders and educators across demographic divides. The chapters cover an overall international and cross-cultural approach in examining the factors at play for business schools of the future and the challenges they face across a range of megatrends affecting today's business environment. The authors impress the need for stakeholders to strategically engage others in the business and education ecosystems through commitment to experimentation, innovation, and sustainable business strategy. Identifying such opportunities for development of a new model for business schools is important to educators and policymakers in preparing to leverage and contribute to existing megatrends to create shared value for regional economies and in new directions.

The Innovative Business School is written for business schools' management and decision-makers, related stakeholders, universities, accreditation agencies, and postgraduate students.

Part 1
Innovating the business school

The Fourth Industrial Revolution started in 2012. It will bring about unprecedented change and as a society we are now entering unchartered territory.

The complexity and plurality of industrial revolution 4.0 includes advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), and blockchain technology.

It is now globally recognized that industrial revolution 4.0 represents a fundamental change in the way we live, work, and relate to each other. It is inevitable that, as with any revolution, change will occur in desirable and undesirable ways.

The effects of the change of this revolution are already evident in the way in which societies produce, distribute, and consume the full range of goods and services that underpin human existence, and which drive human development. However, there are considerable differences in the pace of change within different socio-technical systems and between different countries. A particular area of intense change is in production systems.

By 2030, over two billion jobs as we know them today will have disappeared, freeing up talent for many and new industrial revolution 4.0 fledgling industries, with many opportunities to the innovation sector and their creators, fundamentally changing the nature of work.

As industrial revolution 4.0 rule of thumb, 60% of jobs that will exist toward the end of 2030 have not yet been conceived of or invented.

Toward 2030, basic computer programming will be considered a core skill required in over 30% of future industries and work.

Futurists predict that humankind will experience more changes in our immediate future, than our combined history put together.

Implementing the research actions orientated toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution requires substantial stakeholder participation, as well as cross-sectoral cooperation within the cultural and creative industries.

By 2030, a surge of microtraining colleges and institutions will spring to life, as part of educating the future workforce. Each will require less than six months training and apprentices to prepare us in switching or adapting to our professions.

In a time of extraordinary change, every individual, business, industry, and government are being impacted by breakthroughs in computing power, connectivity, AI, biotechnology, and other innovative technologies—​this is a revolution without boundaries, spreading across the world with incredible velocity. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here and it is real. What is most important for educators is how it is to be harnessed and carried to future leaders to the greater benefit of all.

So, where does all this leave the more than 16,000 business schools worldwide training tomorrow’s leaders today?

We offer our response in this first part of The Innovative Business School.

1 Introduction: will business schools be the disrupter or the disrupted?

Our book was developed as a blueprint for the innovative business school of the next decade, where professors train executives to transform the coming technological disruptions into an avenue for world economic development and prosperity. The specific need for the book arose from the problem that opportunities identified in the literature as a result of this process are broad and do not offer a specific prescription for success. Business schools must consider a range of megatrends affecting today’s business environment, with foremost that of the human demographics, innovation, sustainable development, and technology driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution (industrial revolution 4.0).

Industrial revolution 4.0 poses risks to the political, economic, and social fabric of all countries and communities (Adendorff & Putzier, 2018). It will mean significant changes as well as challenges for governments, businesses, civil society organizations, and the media. Davis (2012) indicated that one of the most intense impacts of the industrial revolution 4.0 will be on the jobs people have and the skills that are necessary for success. From the perspective of emerging economies, this is of particular concern considering the high level of unemployment in the country (Adendorff & Putzier, 2018). Any further job losses will have a severe impact on tax revenues; pension funds will be affected, and it is probable that the social damage as a far-reaching result of lost taxes, lost employment, and lower gross domestic product (GDP) will increase (Burda, 2015).

Davis (2012) also mentions that a hallmark of globalized, dematerialized markets is the trend to assign massive rewards to “stars”, that is, individuals, products, or businesses who, either through fluke or distinctive talent, gain early and pervasive attention at the cost of those less fortunate or not quite as talented. At the same time, the very presence of global platforms to facilitate such dissemination, along with reduced transactional costs, also suggests substantial gains for those who own the platforms and connected infrastructure and further generates new fears for aggravated inequality within countries (Davis, 2012). One such example is WhatsApp, which created extraordinary returns for a small group of creators and investors when Facebook agreed to pay USD 22 billion for the company, which then consisted of just 55 employees, in February 2014 (Baweja, Donovan, Haefele, Siddiqi, & Smiles, 2016).

The capacity of business schools to change within industrial revolution 4.0 will govern their survival; in order to preserve their competitive edge, business schools must prove proficient in embracing a realm of disruptive revolution and either expose their structures to new levels of efficiency and transparency or face growing discontent. Given the speed of change and far-reaching impacts, business schools across the globe are being challenged to an unparalleled point not just for purposes of educating tomorrow’s leaders, but for their very survival. Our book is taking a futures methodology approach to systematically explore, recommend, and propose both desirable and possible future visions to assist in the creation of a new kind of business school. The innovative business school will have long-term policies, plans, and strategies for constantly redesigning their curriculum to convey training and knowledge in close alignment with the world business school graduates will be called upon to build in the coming years. Possibly the most generally understood purpose of futures method is to aid in identifying what you don’t know, but must know, in order to make more intelligent choices. Before educating the students, business school leaders and faculty must prepare themselves to prepare adequately and have a clear grasp of how the Fourth Industrial Revolution might shape the worldwide economy and society into the next decade.

Developed and developing societies are currently informed by two guiding models, namely the ‘science’ (or knowledge-based) society and the ‘sustainable’ society. The science society is predominantly driven by the megatrends of ‘scientific and technological innovations, knowledge transfer, qualification, and education’ (Kreibich, Oertel, & Wölk, 2012). In order to gain a competitive advantage in this fast-changing world, it is imperative that business schools embrace their role in shaping the leaders of tomorrow’s global economy and megatrend challenges today. It is scientific discovery and technological innovation, forces of nature, and social and political dynamics that essentially determine the future; however, it is mankind’s choices that progressively shape it. While future-oriented work like our book is concerned about learning and looking at new insights to achieve a variety of different ends (Iversen, 2006), the purpose of futures research is to help inform insights, choices, and alternatives concerning the future.

From a theoretical perspective, our ideas and visions within this book were guided by the theoretical research frameworks within disruptive innovation theory (Christensen, Raynor, & McDonald, 2015). Markides (2006) and King and Baatartogtokh (2015) interpreted Christensen’s (1992) original notion of “the innovator’s dilemma”, which eventually morphed into a theory of disruptive innovation (Christensen, Raynor, & McDonald, 2015), by stating that disruptive innovation concepts are ‘new to the world products’ or ‘business model innovations’ not just technical innovations. Disruptive innovation theory in terms of education consists of extending knowledge to allow academics to be the driver for creating improved access to high-quality education, designing personalized education, and circumnavigating the politics of education, while deciding what needs to be taught and how (Arnett, 2014).

Disruptive innovation theory can be applied in understanding and making recommendation for building innovative MBA programs on data from relevant research questions addressing today’s challenges of the global marketplace such as gender-related issues, digital entrepreneurship. AI, technology diffusion in developing economies, and the impact of business on economic development and sustainability (Anderson, Ellwood, & Coleman, 2017; Dover, Manwani, & Munn, 2018). Today’s business schools must strategically engage others in the business and education ecosystems, by a commitment to experimentation, innovation, and sustainable business strategy (Horn & Dunagan, 2018). This is a vision for a future where the innovative business school of the next decade changes the narrative about the role of business education as well as that of business in society (AACSB, 2018). Therefore, this book will attempt to offer a future vision of business education and map the way forward for business school innovators in answering the following central research question: What areas of innovation and strategy must be addressed by business school leaders and educators to support a new model of business education which trains executives to transform today’s technological and market disruptions into an avenue for world economic development and prosperity across demographic divides?

In identifying opportunities into a new model for the MBA curriculum, it is important to business educators to seize upon existing megatrends evolving regional economies in new directions. One comment we often heard from business students around the world is the tug of war within their faculty between those with outdated knowledge and those with teaching models based on megatrends stemming from industrial revolution 4.0. Today’s business schools must strategically engage others in the business and education ecosystems, by a commitment to experimentation and innovation not just in student learning but first and foremost in teaching. This is a vision for a future where the business school redesigns both its mission and curriculum to change the narrative about the role of business education, and of business, in society. For business schools to transform into centers of learning and training for leaders facing tomorrow’s local and global challenges, first their own faculty must comprise educators and mentors whose teaching, research, and professional practice revolve around the megatrends of the next decade.

In developing our forecasting of megatrends to affect business school teaching models, we first looked to those explored by world-renowned professors and thought leaders Terence Tse and Mark Esposito in their 2017 ground-breaking book: Understanding How the Future Unfolds: Using Drive to Harness the Power of Today’s Megatrends. Tse and Esposito’s scholarly work offers a holistic way to think about tomorrow by preparing for it today in a framework they named DRIVE, which examined five interrelated megatrends for the future: demographic and social changes, resource scarcity, inequalities, volatility, complexity, and scale and enterprising dynamics. Within these complex topics, we extended the range of megatrends business schools can consider affecting today’s business environment when developing innovative training programs for tomorrow’s leaders, as we visualize in Figure 1.1: the internet of everything (IoE),...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword: Time to rethink the MBA—A look into the future
• Part 1 Innovating the business school
• Part 2 The future of the business school
• Bibliography
• Index