EFMD Global Focus, Vol. 15 Issue 3 - Synchronous or Asynchronous Online Teaching

The EFMD Business Magazine | Iss3 Vol.15 | www.efmd.org

Synchronous or Asynchronous Online Teaching

Set your talent up for success in 2021!

EFMD Global Virtual Fair Career Fest 1 19 - 23 April 2021

Join the largest virtual fairs for talent ever organized ...and other open events created by leading companies worldwide including AB InBev, Google Schneider, Roche and many more!

MULTI PAVILION

LIVE CHAT

+

EFMD Global Virtual Fair Career Fest 2 October 2021

VIDEO CHAT

JOB POSTINGS

WEBINARS

Create your own virtual event available exclusively for your talent and corporate partners!

APPOINTMENTS

RESOURCES

ANALYTICS

FOR MORE INFO VISIT

SUPPORT

institutions.highered.global

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Contents

14

Global Focus The EFMD Business Magazine Iss.3 Vol.15 | 2021

Executive Editor Matthew Wood / matthew.wood@efmd.org Advisory Board Eric Cornuel Howard Thomas John Peters Editorial Assistant Joanna Britton

Synchronous or Asynchronous Online Teaching Previous discussions on synchronous or asynchronous teaching focused on technical and didactical aspects. Thomas Bieger and Samuel Heer explore its impacts on long term value.

Design & Art Direction Jebens Design / www.jebensdesign.co.uk

10

Photographs & Illustrations © Jebens Design Ltd / EFMD unless otherwise stated Editorial & Advertising Matthew Wood / matthew.wood@efmd.org Telephone: +32 2 629 0810 www.globalfocusmagazine.com www.efmd.org EFMD Rue Gachard 88 – Box 3, 1050 Brussels, Belgium ©

More ways to read Global Focus You can read Global Focus in print, online and on the move, in English, Chinese, Russian or Spanish Go to globalfocusmagazine.com to access the online library of past issues Your say We are always pleased to hear your thoughts on Global Focus, and ideas on what you would like to see in future issues.

Please address comments and ideas to Matthew Wood at EFMD: matthew.wood@efmdglobal.org 2

4

Pivoting towards an Innovative Executive Education Ecosystem in Business Schools How can business schools best prepare the next generation of future-focused leaders? Jordi Diaz and Daphne Halkias investigate.

14

Practising what we preach: Online learning for EFMD Programme Accreditation Robert Galliers, Jens Petter Tøndel, and Barbara Sporn reflect on their experience of this year’s EFMD Programme Accreditation workshops.

20

What does the future hold for Europe’s Universities?

A lasting lesson from this pandemic is that collaboration can lead to a more sustainable future for higher education. Anthony Tattersall investigates.

24

Humanistic Management for an Entrepreneurial Society What might Peter Drucker, the management great, have made of our reactions to the COVID-19 crisis? By Richard Straub.

Contents | Global Focus

28

76

28

58

32

62

Standardising admissions – Building a club Groucho Marx would proudly join Integrity, diversity and fairness are the key to building the right cohort in business schools, argues Sangeet Chowfla.

The Engaged Scholar Andrew Hoffman seeks to inspire academic scholars to bring their work to the publics that need it, and to inspire administrators to make public engagement more acceptable and legitimate.

38

Inspiring Corporate Learning Martin Moehrle and Steven Smith introduce the new EFMD CLIP Framework.

42

‘Sustainable Future’ Business school rankings have induced devotion and ridicule since they were first developed, abut maintain huge popularity with prospective students and administrators. Simon Linacre looks at how the status quo could change.

46

Effective thought leadership in Business Schools Vince-Wayne Mitchell, William S. Harvey and Eric Knight ask why, when we read newspapers, business magazines or social media stories, are so few business school academics featured?

52

Business school advisory boards: increasing engagement, adding value Sarah Hardcastle investigates the inextricable link between advisory board member engagement and the value they add.

Enhancing business school education and business performance through intellectual property Christian Archambeau looks at why intellectual property is important to businesses and accordingly to business schools.

Mothers doing doctorates part-time – why do we make it harder than it needs to be?

If universities really want mature students with families to succeed they’ll need to completely rethink the traditional image of the “doctoral student”, say Sue Cronshaw, Peter Stokes, and Alistair McCulloch.

66

The virtuous circle of specialisation and career evolution Offering faculty better recognition and rewarding them for their actual contributions and for what they are passionate about,

by Valérie Moatti.

70

An urgent call for innovation in Business Education There is no end to the possibilities for innovation in business education! But how can business professors become motors of this innovation, ask Kivanc Cubukcu and Svenia Busson.

76

The paradoxical relationship of Management Teachers to uncertainty Classrooms are unpredictable places, but over the last year, teachers and learners have faced a whole new level of uncertainty. How can we live with this and learn from it, ask Michel Fiol, Kristine de Valck and Carolina Serrano-Archimi.

3

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Synchronous or Asynchronous Online Teaching

Previous discussions on synchronous or asynchronous teaching focused on technical and didactical aspects.

But the decision on online teaching formats is also highly relevant to a school’s strategy. Thomas Bieger and Samuel Heer explore its impacts on long term value for students, resource planning, and in the end the positioning of the school in the academic value chain

4

Synchronous or Asynchronous Online Teaching | Thomas Bieger and Samuel Heer

Despite the technologies available in class, lectures and seminars kept their position as the dominant form of teaching at traditional business schools

A question of strategy for business schools in the aftermath of COVID-19.

1. Underused disconnection of place and time of teaching and learning Since its origins, traditional teaching at institutions of higher education happend face-to-face in lectures. Schools operated on a value chain with the key elements of research, translating research into teaching content, teaching by professors to their students, selecting and developing of junior researchers.

Since the origins of media technology – basically since printing technology was invented in the 15th century and textbooks theoretically could replace lectures – a process of ongoing decoupling of time and place of teaching and learning took place. Important steps in the process are highlighted in the table on p7.

Only the most recent virtual conferencing technologies allowed for simultaneous teaching of classes in an interactive distant format.

Despite the technologies available in class, lectures and seminars kept their position as the dominant form of teaching at traditional business schools. Classroom teaching allows interactive, very personal formats which support the development of class spirit and transformational learning experiences.

Traditional classroom teaching also allows the schools to protect their most important resources, faculty and students, because with face-to-face lectures schools are in full control of access to lecture halls and thereby to their teaching product. Schools can protect their

teaching competencies and students have unique access to the scientific and didactical competencies of their professors. On the other hand, schools and professors have a monopoly regarding their students. They are protected from direct competition on the module and course level. As a consequence, despite some dedicated online programmes mostly on the level of graduate programmes, teaching was not really affected by global competition and there was no real disruption to the academic teaching value chain so far.

2. Covid and the fast implementation of AOT and SOT COVID-19 forced universities to move to online formats on very short notice. In many cases this was not an organised and strategically led process. Initiatives were left to the individual professors. Schools would have been satisfied if online teaching worked technically and without major complaints from the students. Some professors were uploading lectures on learning platforms which students could enjoy as podcast lectures. Others were holding live lectures and seminars online with more or less direct interaction based on video conferencing tools like Zoom or MS Teams. Thus, the two forms of online distance teaching, synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning, very often emerged side by side.

Asynchronous Online-Teaching (AOT) is based on the decoupling of the place and time of teaching. Students can follow the teaching and consume learning materials autonomously

5

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

according to their own schedule. Learning materials may consist of reading material, videoclips, recorded lectures, or instruction movies. Interaction takes place with time delays through blogs, discussion forums, mails, or recorded messages. The platforms used are Learning Management Systems like Moodle or Canvas LMS. Synchronous Online-Teaching (SOT) is a form of teaching which relies on decoupling of place but not time. Students are not autonomous in scheduling their learning process. Interaction takes place simultaneously, similar to traditional classroom teaching. Often, in smaller groups at least, there is a camera-on policy and even cold calls are possible.

Supporting learning materials can be delivered like with AOT. Teleconferencing tools like Zoom or MS Teams are used which also allow recording of the teaching elements.

From a student's perspective, literature shows different advantages and disadvantages for both formats (see, among others, Bernard et al., 2004; Hratinski, 2008 or 2020; Murphy et al., 2011): - Asynchronous online teaching supports cognitive processes and shows positive effects on learning success and the attitude of students, mainly because students can follow teaching at their own speed or even repeat sequences at the times that best suit them.

Accordingly, asynchronous teaching might be best suited for analytical knowledge learning (learning goal “know”) like knowing quantitative methods. However, without support of the students’ learning schedule with intermediate quizzes, there is the risk that students postpone learning to the latest possible date because there is no enforced learning rhythm – they disengage from the course. To be successful, AOT requires substantial investments in pedagogical concepts.

- Synchronous teaching strengthens the students’ motivation thanks to interactivity, and consequently success rates tend to be higher and drop-out rates lower. Synchronous teaching might be best suited for higher learning goals like application or transformational goals (“do” and “be”) involving didactical formats like case study discussions or debates. Quality of media technology (platforms and

6

communication channels with chats, cold and warm calls) as well as didactical qualities of the moderation are critical success factors to draw on the full potential of interactive exchanges and the presence of fellow students as well as professors. If synchronous teaching is performed just as an online version of traditional one-way lectures it misses its potential. SOT also structures the learning process through ritual events and supports students’ engagement with regular participation improving learning success.

The course "Introduction to Management Studies" at the University of St. Gallen was delivered in a synchronous online teaching setting in fall 2020. Even with groups of 700 students an interactive format could be achieved thanks to chat and cold calls. In a post-lecture survey 97% of the students answered that they visited at least 80% of the modules (the highest possible response). Students who were more critical of SOT wanted recorded lectures to have more flexibility and follow their own learning cycle (times and speed):

2020

The course "introduction to management studies" at the University of St. Gallen was delivered in a synchronous online teaching setting in fall 2020

Synchronous or Asynchronous Online Teaching | Thomas Bieger and Samuel Heer

Time

Technical formats

Didactical Formats

Decoupling of place

Decoupling of time

Interactivity

Since antics

Lecture halls

Lectures (initially based on handwritten manuscripts) Seminars

-

-

possible

Since invention of book printing in the 15th century

Textbooks

Self-study of textbooks

+

+

-

With upcoming gramophone/film technology end of 19th century)

Audiovisual tools like recorded lectures or instruction movies

Self-study with audio/video

+

+

-

Radio from early 20th and TV mid-20th century

Broadcast lectures and demonstrations on radio and TV

Audio/video self-study

+

-

-

Internet 1.0, end of 20th century

Web platforms with text, additional material and quizzes, later video tutorials, podcast lectures

Extended self-study with lecture elements

+

+

-

Internet 2.0 about 2010

Web platforms with asynchronous interaction with blogs, comments/ feedback from instructors and peers

Interactive self-study

+

+

+ (only with time lags and nonpersonal)

Since about 2015

Video conferencing which allows synchronous interactive formats

Interactive lectures and seminars

+

-

+

"The course should be recorded and be available for one day. The course was the only one at 8:15 in the morning and the only lecture that was not recorded. The argument was that by not recording it, you want to make the day more structured for the students, but if all the other courses are recorded, it doesn't make sense – in my opinion. Either all courses have to be recorded or none."

An impressive number of students explicitly mentioned that the simultaneous setting supported their learning rhythm and engagement thanks to a time structure:

Asynchronous online teaching supports cognitive processes and shows positive effects on learning success and the attitude of students

7

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Synchronous online teaching allows a school to strengthen interactivity in teaching, and to provide a unique setting where students can learn from each other

"The lecturer’s decision not to record the lectures has helped me personally a lot to get into a 'rhythm' on the day of the lecture. Also, lecturer’s personal interactions with students via chat or direct questions give me a certain sense of normality regarding studies, despite the current situation."

A mixed version – of synchronous teaching with recording and the possibility to follow the lecture at a later, self-chosen moment – seems not to be feasible for different reasons. Without any pressure or incentives students might tend to switch to the recorded version for personal convenience. Consequently, the richness of synchronous teaching is eroded. Rich, interactive group discussions seem to have properties of a “club good”. Positive external effects of rich and interactive synchronous delivery only occur if there is a sufficient degree of participation. Since no members of the “club” (or class) can be excluded from the benefits of the synchronous teaching when it is recorded, there is no (or limited) benefit of participation. Additional incentives for participation like points and grades for oral participation could help but might conflict with the didactical concept of the course.

3. The choice of online teaching formats – a decision of strategic importance to the school While the forms of online teaching are heavily researched for their impact on learning success there has not been deeper discussion of their impact on the school’s strategy and and competitive position. Nevertheless, the two different forms of online teaching show completely different strategic opportunities, but also threats: Excellent asynchronous online teaching can be marketed on a larger scale and thereby be leveraged beyond the school. But it sets the school in full competition for best course modules. If quality is bad, students turn to better modules on the market. Why should

8

a student follow a second class “canned” production with lower technical and didactical quality from the home university when there are top courses available and accessible? The opportunity of a greater reach therefore requires significant investments in pedagogical concepts.

Synchronous online teaching allows a school to strengthen interactivity in teaching, and to provide a unique setting where students can learn from each other. Thanks to interactive formats and stronger student engagement higher learning goals like application or even transformational goals can be achieved – beyond just “knowing” also “doing” (application) and even “being” (change of attitudes and believes). It also strengthens the personal links among students and with faculty. It thus has a higher potential for creating bonds to the school. Also, it makes it possible to protect unique combinations of content and didactics.

But the opportunities for teaching quality and bonding require didactical quality of lecturers and robust media technology. This format also enables collaborative teaching formats with different schools sharing courses.

97%

In a post-lecture survey 97% of the students answered that they visited at least 80% of the modules

Synchronous or Asynchronous Online Teaching | Thomas Bieger and Samuel Heer

Content quality

No content quality

Faculty teaching skills

Opportunistic AoL or Sol

Focus on optimal interaction quality – share courses with close partners - SoT

Limited faculty teaching skills

Develop courses on areas of strengths – sell them and source external for weaknesses - AoL

Degrade to a broker for students

Therefore, based on the strategic goals and the resources available, a school must decide whether to favour and encourage an AOT or rather SOT. The following generic strategies can be discussed: Grow beyond A school that wants to grow beyond its geographical markets and therefore take advantage of economies of scale might want to encourage their faculty to use AOT. This requires competitive advantages in content and pedagogical concepts. Technical support is required for creating video sequences and supportive teaching instruments. Collaboration between researchers, specialists in pedagogy, and technical support staff is crucial.

Campus first A school that wants to follow a quality strategy for its teaching and to encourage interactive formats which also promote long-term student and graduate loyalty might foster SOT. This requires investments in the didactical skills of lecturers as well as interactive media technology.

Opportunistic “laissez-faire” Schools which have both excellent content quality as well as faculty with didactical skills, might allow an opportunistic process. To leverage the strategic advantages of both AOT and SOT, deliberate decisions and investments might be needed to reinforce strengths and develop top courses that might be opened or even sold externally and at the same time invest in the didactical quality of their faculty.

Without any strengths or investment capacity in either content quality or in faculty didactical skills, AOT and also SOT might not be successful in the long term. Online teaching makes teaching exchangeable. If a school is not able to deliver modules to the market because lack of quality and is also unable to generate proper interactive teaching quality, it might be better to become a broker for students, preselecting appropriate external courses, compiling and marketing them efficiently. Like in other industries, important questions will be: - What is the institution able to produce itself, and what would it rather source from the market?

- What added value does the institution deliver to the students?

About the Authors Thomas Bieger, former president of The University of St Gallen.

Samuel Heer, Teaching Innovation Lab of the University of St. Gallen.

9

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Pivoting towards an Innovative Executive Education Ecosystem in Business Schools

Nowadays, when you can seemingly learn anything online for free, how can business schools best prepare the next generation of future-focused leaders? Jordi Diaz and Daphne Halkias investigate

10

Pivoting towards an Innovative Executive Education Ecosystem in Business Schools | Jordi Diaz and Daphne Halkias

I

t is no secret that as our economy changes, so do the demands of our workforce. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, during a conversation at the Satellite 2020 conference earlier this year, said colleges ‘are not for learning’, but rather a place to have fun. Musk tells us we can learn anything online for free. Now, prominent companies such as Google and Apple are hiring employees who have the skills required to get jobs done, with or without a degree. Google, Apple, and IBM do not require applicants to have a college degree to land a job. Google recently launched a new selection of courses for the Google Career Certificate, a six-month programme that prepares participants for in-demand jobs.

Without the in-demand skills needed to land jobs that are sprouting globally because of the fourth industrial revolution, those with only a four-year or even a year-long course of study leading to a classical Master's degree will soon be all but excluded from these opportunities.

Today's most relevant and utilised provider for executive education programmes for reskilling/upskilling has appeared outside the business school itself. The industry sector has stepped in where business schools lack readiness and reparation for the future of work.

The pandemic has accelerated trends such as working and studying from home, offering the perfect conditions for low-end and new-market disruptive innovations to happen, and transforming from an industry of two main educational stops (Bachelor's degree and MBA) to lifelong learning scenarios with multiple and constant stops.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, during a conversation at the Satellite 2020 conference earlier this year, said colleges ‘are not for learning’, but rather a place to have fun

11

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

In the post-COVID-19 era, many industry leaders and scholars label business schools as irrelevant executive education providers for today's labor market. For business education providers to recapture the “skills” provider role from in-house corporate programmes will take more than adjusting to automation, remote working, and artificial intelligence. Reskilling (learning new skills to do a different job) and upskilling (teaching and learning additional skills for one's present job) of business professionals require effective partnerships between education providers and industry. Project management, business process, communication data, and digital design are business enablers' skills that turn theoretical knowledge and skills into practice.

Reskilling and upskilling programmes in post-secondary education requires a three-step process that incorporates (i) identification of which skills are needed for coping with the new business reality of the organisation, (ii) a clear recognition of the gap between the skills of today's workforce versus the new business model, and (iii) a selection of partners that will support an academic institution’s reskilling and upskilling effort as a lifelong learning journey.

Business schools need to develop a new curriculum as part of a multidisciplinary, geographically dispersed team of academic and industry experts. Optimal team-based blended instructional design, like optimal blended education, can find the right balance between team members’ ability to create context, introduce themselves to others, and be encouraged in doing so.

Where do business schools’ executive education programs find themselves today at a time of great transition not only in the workplace but through society at large? For the most part, business schools still function through a twentieth-century executive education ecosystem on what and how they teach, how they are governed, and how they engage their faculty and other key stakeholders. Currently,

12

employers see a lack of readiness for business school graduates to properly prepare the present-day workforce for disruptive events such as a pandemic, disrupted job architecture across industries, and the skills employees need to survive given today’s changing workforce requirements. This outcome can be seen in how large and small corporations have taken it upon themselves to develop their own in-house executive education ecosystems to meet the pressing demand of a skilled workforce for today’s market demands.

Business leaders find that the COVID-19 crisis, changing technologies, and novel working methods have pushed forward a new way of running corporations for long-term sustainability and profitability. Society is no longer asking simply for leaders and managers who can “run the world” but for insightful, connected, and empowering agents and ambassadors who create change in the world themselves.

Business Schools need to build corporate

Pivoting towards an Innovative Executive Education Ecosystem in Business Schools | Jordi Diaz and Daphne Halkias

programme partnerships under the frame of an entirely new business education ecosystem model. Promising partnerships that support the education-industry cooperative business model with common goals have begun launching, such as The City University of New York and IBM partnership supporting business students in data science and analytics and urban sustainability.

The business school-industry model pivots over five support beams: it is omnichannel, it is co-developed by educators and corporate clients, it includes educational platforms as part of the delivery, it differs between low-cost online and high-end in-person options, and it focuses on skills building and credentialing rather than just knowledge transfer.

The common goal of business schoolindustry partnerships is to develop a strong bond among the partners for knowledge, technology, and organisational transfer to support digital skills development. Developing both global and local strategies with the cooperation of business schools and regional industries can offer a vision of a future-focused workforce through careful consideration of five inter-related elements: - Thriving in the digital-first future will require new capabilities.

- Shaping real-time business capabilities is made possible through learning in the flow of work.

- Co-creating with industry partners is critical for success.

- Co-creating with alternative educational providers will accelerate the response.

- Reskilling will also need to be about social responsibility for both business leaders and educators.

Today’s business schools must strategically engage others in innovative education ecosystems by committing to experimentation, innovation, and industry partnerships. Academia needs to be prepared to surrender its monopoly on having all the answers about education.

Today, a world in which people expect a constant change of jobs coincides with a mismatch between employees’ skills and those that employers seek. This blurred context between work and skills can be bridged by generating an amplified new executive education ecosystem of academic alternatives, including degree, credit, certificate, boot camp, skill-building program, internal training, and external partnerships that will aid business schools dynamically re-renter the executive education market.

The opportunity to be proactive in the reskilling revolution is calling us. Are we, as business educators, ready to listen?

About the Authors Jordi Diaz is Dean, EADA Business School, Barcelona Daphne Halkias is Professor, École des Ponts Business School Paris

13

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Practising what we preach: Online learning for EFMD Programme Accreditation Turning multiple in-person, international seminars into one online event. Robert Galliers, Jens Petter Tøndel, and Barbara Sporn reflect on their experience of this year’s EFMD Programme Accreditation workshops

14

Practising what we preach: Online learning for EFMD Programme Accreditation | Robert Galliers, Jens Petter Tøndel, and Barbara Sporn

A

Demand for programme accreditation had been steadily increasing since the launch of EPAS in 2005

s the Director for EFMD Programme Accreditation was saying back in 2020, “Things are going so well!” The EFMD Board’s decision to rebrand EFMD programme accreditation was implemented without a hitch, with a shift from EPAS to EFMD Accredited in the spring of 2019 (enabling, among other things, better featuring of specific programmes, and allowing EQUIS schools to seek accreditation for their flagship and/or innovative programmes).

Guideline documents had been revised in line with the new policy; interest in programme accreditation continued to accelerate; more and more programmes – from undergraduate through to doctorate level – were being accredited.

Demand for programme accreditation had been steadily increasing since the launch of EPAS in 2005. For example, the number of programmes reviewed had increased by 260%, from just 48 in the five-year period up to 2010, to 173 over the 2015-2020 period. By the end of 2020, 120 programmes had been accredited worldwide. Interest from EQUIS-accredited schools was growing with, for example, the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), Rennes School of Business, Toulouse School of Management, ESCP and SKEMA (France), Nottingham Trent University (UK), CEIBS (China) and Curtin University (Australia) among others – with programmes covering the whole gamut, from undergraduate, to MBA, to PhD – setting the pace.

And then… COVID-19 struck. From an institutional perspective, the reaction was immediate and comprehensive; it had to be.

Institutions throughout the world had to go into overdrive, endeavouring to ensure that their programmes remained accessible to their students – wherever they happened to be at the time. Faculty members were having to rethink course delivery to facilitate learning at a distance. On-line learning became the norm. Physical learning opportunities at partner institutions abroad became impossible.

In-company projects and internships were under threat. How might such opportunities still be 15

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

provided despite the pandemic? How might digital technologies be harnessed to ensure that student learning was not disrupted? In short, elements of EFMD Programme accreditation were affected at many schools.

The response from EFMD Quality Services was similarly immediate and comprehensive.

Demand for programme accreditation had been increasing still further but physical peer review visits were now out of the question and no less than 24 such visits had to be put on hold. The EFMD Accredited team went into overdrive.

Revised guidelines for virtual peer reviews were developed and revised dates and teams were arranged. Indeed, the first online peer review took place as early as June 2020. In all, 65 virtual peer reviews will have taken place by the end of 2021 … with more to come in 2022.

By mid of 2021, 24 new programmes had been declared eligible and a further 6 had applied, making a total of 30 new programmes in the system, with many being delivered outside of Europe, by schools in Central Asia, Latin and North America as well as the Far East.

The EFMD Programme Accreditation team continued to deliver all services in an online format (e.g., providing advisory peer services, consulting with schools on accreditation). Still, the call for a seminar from those schools in the pipeline became louder and eventually led to – what we think – was an innovative response.

An innovative response: The 2021 online Workshop In normal times and in any given year, EFMD programme accreditation would offer three or four seminars in various locations around the world (e.g., Brussels, Prague, Miami, Rome), attended by some 100 participants per year. As a consequence of the pandemic, no seminars were held in 2020 until the very end of the year – on the contrary, schools were being advised on an individual basis. But the growing numbers of schools seeking accreditation made it clear that the EFMD Programme Accreditation team had to offer a new format of training in an online environment. The idea of a modularised workshop was born.

16

By mid of 2021, 24 new programmes had been declared eligible and a further 6 had applied, making a total of 30 new programmes in the system, with many being delivered outside of Europe, by schools in Central Asia, Latin and North America as well as the Far East

Based on previous experiences and the ongoing interactions with schools, an online workshop (rather than a seminar) was devised.

The objective was developed quickly: we wanted to offer a format suitable for all types of schools and programmes (interested schools, schools in the pipeline seeking eligibility, and schools which have already been declared eligible that are preparing for their peer review) and we wanted to be personally working with participants rather than simply lecturing. Thus, the EFMD Programme Accreditation team was faced with a quandary: how to make the workshop accessible and relevant, despite the wideranging needs of those wanting to participate?

Clearly, a combination of the introductory and advanced seminars was required, but how could this be effectively achieved virtually?

The answer emerged, based on our experience with online programme delivery and past seminars. Principles of flipped classrooms and important lessons on virtual learning from the EOCCS team within EFMD were applied.

The workshop was thus designed, based on the following ideas: • The ‘Y’ model – All workshop participants were exposed to the same content (“common body of knowledge”): the EFMD Programme Accreditation Standards and Criteria were presented jointly by the EFMD Programme Accreditation Directors in an interactive format.

Following that, participants split into “subject” groups (i.e., one group for those in the pre-

42

In total, there were 42 participants from 29 schools and 19 countries (e.g., from South America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia)

Practising what we preach: Online learning for EFMD Programme Accreditation | Robert Galliers, Jens Petter Tøndel, and Barbara Sporn

their own situation. Additionally, the Datasheet/ SAR case was a much-appreciated example which facilitated preparation and discussion. In this sense, by encouraging participation prior to and during the session ,plus on-going networking afterwards, the workshop could add real value.

In total, there were 42 participants from 29 schools and 19 countries (e.g., from South America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia). 10 Schools from the pre-eligibility phase were represented alongside 19 from the post-eligibility phase. Altogether, we ran 3 parallel working groups.

The Views of the Participants The evaluation shows that the workshop was viewed as very helpful and the EFMD Programme Accreditation team learned a great deal from the experience. The format was rated as highly satisfactory and, most importantly, we were able to meet the immediate demand to provide advice to over 40 colleagues from 29 institutions who are at various stages of the programme accreditation process.

eligibility phase, and another for those in the posteligibility phase). These smaller groups worked interactively to understand the development of a datasheet or self-assessment report (SAR) respectively. The majority of time was dedicated to Q&A, working in those groups, and networking given required pre-workshop preparation.

• Preparation is key – A compulsory online preparation session two weeks prior to the workshop helped to explain the format, set expectations, and, most importantly, facilitate networking among participants who were assigned working groups. Then, a week before the workshop, all slides and a sample datasheet and SAR from a successful school were shared – again in order to help participants prepare thoroughly.

• Participation as a key success factor – By establishing working groups prior to the workshop, participants could reflect on their own situation in light of the principal EFMD programme accreditation requirements and come prepared with key questions relevant to

17

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

The workshop needs to provide enough time to facilitate interaction and networking. For this, lengthy presentations need to be avoided and attention will be paid to explicating certain participant-driven concerns

18

Some very useful advice came from the participants in terms of making the experience even more worthwhile, including the following points: • Including guest speakers: the sharing of experience from schools that went through the accreditation process in a live talk.

• More time for networking: participants should be able to form communities of learning that would sustain the workshop and help sharing of experience in the future.

• Learning from mistakes: even though best examples are very useful, learning from mistakes would be appreciated. Participants are interested to learn what to avoid and what had worked less well in the past.

• Use of online material: videos or other online learning tools could be used further to free up valuable time for interaction.

• Focus: participants benefit the most if they are in a learning environment that caters especially to their needs. Hence a good mix of general sessions with specific sessions is appreciated.

Practising what we preach: Online learning for EFMD Programme Accreditation | Robert Galliers, Jens Petter Tøndel, and Barbara Sporn

Quo vadis?

Overall, the workshop on EFMD Programme Accreditation worked well in an online setting.

The different aspects emerging from the participants’ feedback point us in the right direction to make the workshop even more useful in the future. We are considering three areas in particular.

First, the intention is to maximise the focus on participants’ preparation for the workshop (reading EFMD Programme Accreditation Standards and Criteria, study the available material in the form of a datasheet, SAR, visiting schedule, etc., and preparing specific questions relevant for participants). Based on this foundation, we – as facilitators rather than presenters – can be even more focused on participants’ actual learning needs.

Second, the workshop needs to provide enough time to facilitate interaction and networking. For this, lengthy presentations need to be avoided and attention will be paid to explicating certain participant-driven concerns.

Materials will be made available well ahead of time so there can be even more focus on discussion, Q&A, and networking.

Third, different new elements can be introduced (e.g., avoidable mistakes) by sharing examples of documents (with permission of course), video material for pre-workshop viewing (e.g., explaining certain standards or introducing guest speakers from accredited programmes).

With this, we hope to make the workshop even more relevant for participants in the future.

After the first workshop and the feedback from our peers, we firmly believe that, while the first online workshop was offered in an effective format, we can improve certain elements further. We are now confident that we can repeat the workshop – this will take place early in 2022. Please look out for the announcement.

We look forward to seeing you there!

About the Authors Robert Galliers, Jens Petter Tøndel and Barbara Sporn are EFMD Programme Accreditation and Workshop Facilitators

19

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

What does the future hold for Europe’s Universities?

A lasting lesson from this pandemic is that collaboration can lead to a more sustainable future for higher education – through its worst crisis, a shared ecosystem inspired a global solution that minimised the impact of campus closures worldwide. Anthony Tattersall investigates

20

What does the future hold for Europe’s Universities? | Anthony Tattersall

Incorporating in-demand skills that employers are looking for into the universities’ curriculum is the obvious way forward

I

2.7m Coursera for Campus enabled more than 4,000 universities to frame a resilient crisis response through the upheaval of the pandemic.

This equates to 2.7 million students and 24 million course enrolments.

n February 2020, when higher education was hit by the COVID-19 outbreak, Duke Kunshan University in China – a partnership between Duke University and Wuhan University – was searching for a solution to continue teaching 600 students in quarantine. Without the luxury of time or resources in the midst of a public health crisis, Duke Kunshan University found support in the high-calibre library of courseware from hundreds of Coursera partners on Coursera for Campus. By deploying ready-made, online courses aligned to their curriculum, Duke Kunshan faculty rapidly transitioned to remote teaching, ensuring learning continuity.

This solution led to a model that scaled with agility when large-scale campus closures disrupted learning for millions of students worldwide. Over the last year, Coursera for Campus enabled more than 4,000 universities to frame a resilient crisis response through the upheaval of the pandemic. This equates to 2.7 million students and 24 million course enrolments.

Just one year since this drastic change, a recent report by the European University Association (EUA), which includes data from 48 countries, already points towards educators feeling digital learning can be ‘a powerful change driver’. Participants in this report said it has unlocked benefits like ‘collaboration with other higher education institutions at an international level’ (64%) and ‘widened outreach for international students’ (57%).

These benefits will be needed as European universities refocus their priorities for the academic year ahead. The uncertainty around enrolments is forcing budget cuts and impacting revenue, while the mobility of international students and rising student deferrals pose new risks to universities. Rethinking alternative, high-quality learning experiences will be critical to deliver an elevated experience – one that is perceived as “valuable” even when it is not delivered in-person and on campus.

As the digital transformation of higher education continues and universities adjust to the shifting student priorities created by the crisis, the question is, what can universities do to adapt from the experimentation phase of the past year to shape a longer-term response?

Enhancing employability through blended classrooms According to the 2021 EU joint employment report, the COVID crisis is ‘breaking a six-year-long positive trend in the European Union's labor market’. It cautions that member states risk a sharp increase in youth employment. A job market under stress has serious implications for new graduates. Higher education institutes will have to fine-tune their focus on the “employability” of students entering this crisis-ridden job market in order to address the challenge.

Incorporating in-demand skills that employers are looking for into the universities’ curriculum is the obvious way forward. If curricula stand scrutiny for industry-relevant competencies, graduates have more chances of emerging job-ready and employable.

Collaborating with other universities on content through a blended classroom model, where universities offer ready-made courses from top institutions on online learning platforms that supplement their degree offerings, could be a way for universities to deliver an upgraded education that fills these gaps.

This supplemental option is student-friendly because it is flexible, self-paced, and it allows students to easily explore new interests outside their major. Its pioneers include the University of Salzburg, which is using online courses on Coursera to enrich students in their Computer Science Department with international knowledge and perspective and Highered, the careers platform for EFMD, which recently partnered with Coursera to provide access to job-relevant content for students from 700 business schools in 90 countries.

21

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Preparing students for the jobs of tomorrow The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020 finds that between now and 2025, companies expect to restructure their workforces in response to new technologies like cloud computing, big data analytics, IoT and cybersecurity. Demand for digital job roles, like that of a data scientist and machine learning specialist, will increase. Universities will need to align curriculums based on predicted market demand, to equip graduates for these jobs.

Teaching skills across high-demand domains like cybersecurity, data science, and cloud computing will become extremely important. In a “business education”, for instance, technology and data science are becoming increasingly critical skill areas for popular careers such as financial advisor, marketer or management consultant. Universities can look to supplement degree programs with courses taught by leading industry educators like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, whose tools are often used on-thejob. By leveraging these resources, higher education institutions will be well placed to augment in-house programmes, fast enough to adapt to digital transformation.

When top-ranked Hungarian university, University of Szeged, was looking to modernise the delivery of its curriculum, it opened up access for students to learning material on Coursera for Campus – this would otherwise have taken months to develop. ‘Students want more flexibility in how they earn their degrees,’ explains Peter Szakál, Director of Academic Affairs at the University of Szeged, adding, ‘Expanding our distance learning with high-quality courses allows us to attract more students from Hungary, across Europe, and abroad, which ultimately fosters greater diversity and success for our students and university.’

Institutes across Europe – including OpenCampus.sh, Germany and Sofia University, Bulgaria –are also integrating content through Coursera for Campus to deliver job-relevant, multi-disciplinary online learning.

22

Equipping students to master job-relevant skills digitally Another big fallout for students over the pandemic has been the lost opportunity to gain work experience through internships, which traditionally give students a chance to prove their mettle as “future prospects”. Three fifths of employers say they had to cancel some or all of their work experience placements last summer in the UK. Much is the same across the rest of Europe and the world. “Hands-on” learning has emerged as an alternative for students to demonstrate their ability to apply job-relevant skills and use in-demand tools.

For example, conducting data analysis using python, or building websites using WordPress can be learnt through Guided Projects on Coursera. Guided Projects launched during the pandemic and have seen a spike in demand ever since, as students look for ways to reinterpret skill development virtually – to show employers what they can do. Top engineering school in Morocco, Ecole Centrale Casablanca, is one of several institutions looking to leverage hands-on learning, using Coursera’s Guided Projects.

Collaborating for future success If anything, the pandemic has catalysed a shift towards global collaboration. ‘All of a sudden, people had to think of new ways to integrate online content, and that made it necessary to collaborate because [educators] were looking for help,’ said Steffen Brandt, project lead and programme evaluation (Data Science and AI) at Opencampus.sh, Germany, speaking recently at a pan-European webinar hosted by THE and Coursera. He added that, previously, German professors ‘wouldn’t use another professor’s teaching content, but this process has now started’. Thrown in at the deep end, universities opened their doors virtually to share resources for the larger community to move forward. Imperial College of London opened up its digital learning hub, which included a detailed walk-through on delivering labs remotely. University of London built a support hub for institutions teaching and assessing online.

What does the future hold for Europe’s Universities? | Anthony Tattersall

Looking ahead, collaboration as a strategy could strengthen and future-proof higher education in the region. The European Universities Initiative is already showing the way by reimagining inter-university campuses and harnessing the diversity of alliance members.

IDEA League, an alliance of five leading science and technology universities in Europe, is rethinking how to foster greater exchange and partnership, including sharing lectures and co-designing new courses.

‘What we know for sure is that no institution will be able to make it alone. Cooperation is the real fulcrum of the pandemic,’ Ferruccio Resta, rector of Politecnico di Milano, a member institution of IDEA League, observed in a recent article.

Working together could create new ecosystems for much larger impact and expanded access. Pooling resources could address some of the big challenges facing higher education after the pandemic, including bridging current faculty shortages, improving affordability and enabling universities to better optimise their offerings.

A united higher education system would undoubtedly build a stronger ecosystem. It would also empower universities across the region to expand their mission – to significantly improve access and reach to a high-quality education, even as they equip students with the skills to succeed in an uncertain world.

About the Author Anthony Tattersall is Vice President EMEA at Coursera

23

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Humanistic Management for an Entrepreneurial Society What might Peter Drucker, the management great, have made of our reactions to the COVID-19 crisis? By Richard Straub

24

Humanistic Management for an Entrepreneurial Society | Richard Straub

P

eter Drucker always insisted that a precondition of a free and functioning society was a set of performing organisations and institutions capable of effectively fulfilling their missions. The alternative was chaos and revolution that would inexorably lead to tyranny.

This was why he singled out management as so important for society, not just for business.

COVID-19 continues to stress-test management to its limits. But some conclusions are already clear. One welcome surprise is the resilience of business. The remarkable thing overall is not that some companies have perished in sectors such as hospitality and travel that have effectively been cancelled. As the economic statistics demonstrate, what is remarkable is that so many are still alive and kicking – a testament to entrepreneurial optimism, managerial adaptability and the will to survive.

Leadership quality has amplified success and failure alike. On the negative side it has become clear that most governments could not live up to the challenge of crisis-management – being caught in botched, vacillating or panicky decision-making and flawed execution. The media played their part in spreading the negatives only as opposed to communicating balanced information. For the public sector it became apparent how things become worse as you move up the hierarchy – from the municipal, to ministerial level and to the political sphere with the ultimate failures at the European Union level where the bureaucratic mindset and a lack of managerial competencies caused significant harm to European citizens.

Conversely, we should take positive lessons from public-private partnerships such the development of a vaccine, crowned by a once-in-a-century success story that underlined the power of cooperation to leverage existing strengths. Equally mass vaccination programs attest to the wisdom of drafting in expert implementation and logistics experience to complement health sector competence. No country has got it all right, however. There is much still to learn, particularly in global cooperation to vaccinate the populations of poorer countries.

COVID-19 COVID-19 continues to stress-test management to its limits. But some conclusions are already clear. One welcome surprise is the resilience of business

25

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Faced with these circumstances, Drucker would surely have judged that the best monument to Covid would be to seize the opportunity now offered to tackle deep-seated fundamental problems

So what has gone wrong? In two words, governance and decision-making. Governance is about having the people at the table who are best placed to help make balanced decisions – including important stakeholders and those with experience of making rapid decisions with incomplete information, whatever their background. Covid has clearly exposed the limits of top-down, centralised and bureaucratic management in dealing with complex, multifaceted issues of organisations and society.

Likewise doctrinaire orthodoxies that surfaced strongly in the medical field tried to thwart new ideas and approaches to management based on observation, experimentation, and continuous learning. AI and algorithmic decision-making are of less help here than people capable of critical thinking and able to integrate diverging points of view. As we tried to show in an earlier HBR article, different types of problem require different modes of thinking – a scientific approach cannot address complex social issues, for example. If political leaders understood this they would have refrained from hollow-sounding calls to “follow the science” in situations where science can only be part of the answer and where the ability to synthesise across domains is their key

26

responsibility. Likewise, risk and uncertainty are an inherent part of modern life and cannot be managed by mere obedience to inflexible dogmas such as the precautionary principle.

“What works” in practice should be the mantra, even if it doesn’t in theory – a principle that is sometimes hard to accept for those brought up in a strict Cartesian spirit.

Faced with these circumstances, Drucker would surely have judged that the best monument to Covid would be to seize the opportunity now offered to tackle deep-seated fundamental problems. The goal would not be a revolutionary “reset” based on a vision of some ideal digital future, but rather a programme of accelerated evolution to create an institutional framework capable of satisfying twenty-first century human and societal needs – starting with those of a young generation that has been deeply disadvantaged by the crisis and is badly in need of a vision and a purpose for a future that currently seems to offer them only shrunken life chances. The starting point

Humanistic Management for an Entrepreneurial Society | Richard Straub

might be Charles Handy’s ringing call at the 2018 Drucker Forum for a renewal of management in the spirit of the Lutheran reformation. That chimes perfectly with Drucker’s concept of management as a “liberal art” in which the art was to use judgement and insight to be alert to emerging reality and ask the right questions; and then to bring to bear all the necessary tools, including technology, to make appropriate human decisions on the way forward. In that way, he believed in the vision of an “entrepreneurial society” in which the capacity to self-renew was widely shared by individuals, institutions and society, and innovation and entrepreneurship had become part of the social and economic DNA. It would be based on, and devoted to, the liberation of what Drucker considered the most important natural resource on the planet: human potential.

Never has that vision seemed more urgent – and as attainable – as it does today.

About the Author Richard Straub is founder and president of the Global Peter Drucker Forum, which this year takes place on 17-19 November 2021.

27

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Standardising admissions – Building a club Groucho Marx would proudly join Integrity, diversity and fairness are the key to building the right cohort in business schools, argues Sangeet Chowfla

I

was recently in conversation with the dean of one of the world’s leading business schools.

We were talking about GMAC research that showed how prospective students were finding it difficult to decide which school(s) to apply to based solely on the merits of their programmes.

The programmes all seemed to be similar, promising the same content and career benefits. We discussed the need to create more competitive differentiation. A unique value proposition. Something distinct.

The dean was clear about what competitive differentiation his school had: real estate and alumni. This caught me by surprise, as I was used to business school leaders talking about their programme content, the quality of faculty, or original research when they talked about their schools. Why real estate and alumni, I asked?

He replied that content, faculty, and research are important enough, but they are table stakes – must haves – and what truly sets a school apart are the things that others do not always have.

By real estate, he meant location, location, location. His school was in a major metropolitan hub of global business that students found attractive. It was a fixed point of distinction, unable to be improved or degraded. Alumni, on the other hand, were a factor he could work on every day. A degree from his school was a signal to both employers and prospective students – not just about what the student had learned

28

during the programme, but about the potential of the individual who held that degree. This signal is not created by the school directly but is instead demonstrated by the success of the alumni who hold a degree from that school. Just as a farmer recognises that the quality of their crop is not just dependent on the quality of their farming but on the quality of their seeds, this dean recognised that identifying and admitting the right students into his programmes was the most important thing that he could do to sustain his competitive differentiation.

Prospective students tell us something similar. Location is incredibly important in their school selection decision, but even more so is the existing alumni network and the perceived success of future alumni – i.e., their own cohort.

Their perception of the quality of the admitted cohort directly translates into their perceptions about the success of future alumni, and therefore the future value of their degree. In a sense, they are echoing Groucho Marx who famously joked that he would refuse to join a club that would have him as a member, implying that it is not worth joining if just anyone can get in. Students are saying, ‘I wouldn’t join a school that would have just anyone as a student.’

Prospective students are acutely aware that the business school brand that they will carry for the rest of their lives lies not just on their own achievements, but also on the achievements of the “club” - their fellow students.

Standardising admissions – Building a club Groucho Marx would proudly join | Sangeet Chowfla

The dean was clear about what competitive differentiation his school had: real estate and alumni. This caught me by surprise, as I was used to business school leaders talking about their programme content, the quality of faculty, or original research when they talked about their schools

29

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Overall, more than half of prospective students agree that the use of exams enhances transparency, fairness, and reliability of the admissions process

Percentage of Respondents

Candidate Perceptions of Admision Exams

58%

55%

54%

55%

27%

27%

28%

28%

15%

18%

18%

18%

A graduate business school's use of admission exams enhances the transparency of the admission process

A graduate business school's use of admission exams demonstrates they place importance on the quality of their students

Admission exams improve fairness in the evaluation of graduate business school candidates

Admission exams improve reliability in the evaluation of graduate business school candidates

Strongly Agree/Agree

Neither Agree Nor Disagree

Strongly Disagree/Disagree

Source: mba.com Prospective Students Survey, GMAC | n= 1, 793 (Jan-Apr, 2021) | GMAC.com/Research

Focusing on student quality Our conversations with deans and candidates suggest that student quality is the most important area for schools to focus on as they grow their reputation and reach. Based on our own nearly 70 years of experience providing business schools with the tools to identify, and curate the ideal cohort, we suggest this effort be structured around three dimensions: 1. Cohort integrity: Business education is highly interactive and participatory. Class discussions, case studies, and industry projects are generally conducted in teams.

Fact-based learning in the classroom is blended with experiential learnings in simulated settings (cases) or actual industry projects, with increasing emphasis on the experiential aspects. In such a setting, a student’s learning is impacted as much by the capabilities of others in their cohort as it is by their own capabilities. Simply put, the rest of the cohort needs to both keep up and add additional value, otherwise the integrity of the cohort is compromised.

2. Cohort diversity: While the cohort must be similar in capability, they must equally be dissimilar in background and experience.

The group is unlikely to learn much if everyone approaches the problem with the same perspective but will learn a great deal 30

from differing approaches of a diverse team.

These different approaches to problem- solving come from the different viewpoints and experiences within the cohort: educational backgrounds, cultural approaches to decision making, gender differences, and experiences derived from working in different types of organisations.

3. Fairness and transparency: Prospective students gain comfort from a transparent and fair admissions process. A transparent process gives them the understanding of how the cohort will be constructed, allowing them to evaluate the “club” before they join it. A fair process helps to ensure that what is said will be done. This is vitally important as the prospective student is committing to an experience and brand that will define their future before they have had an opportunity to experience it themselves.

The science and art of admissions Admissions teams work hard at implementing these practices, building the right cohort, ensuring a diverse mix of talent, and doing so in a fair, transparent manner. This is the essence of holistic admissions practices. Such practices are often anchored in objective data such as admissions test scores and are supplemented by a 360-degree evaluation of a candidate through

Standardising admissions – Building a club Groucho Marx would proudly join | Sangeet Chowfla

Sangeet Chowfla

62%

62% of international students saying the use of a test enhances transparency (13% disagreeing), and 58% saying it increases fairness (16% disagreeing).

interviews, essays, and recommendations.

This is the science (test score) and art (holistic evaluation) of admissions. Students appreciate the process when it is grounded in objective criteria such as an admissions test score, because it ensures both cohort quality and a fair, transparent process.

In a recent study, more than half of students agreed with the proposition that an admissions test increases the transparency, fairness, and reliability of the admissions process. This number was even larger amongst international students with 62% of international students saying the use of a test enhances transparency (13% disagreeing), and 58% saying it increases fairness (16% disagreeing).

Testing also plays an important role in ensuring cohort integrity, confirming that all students within the classroom meet similar standards of academic readiness. It is objective in both content and delivery. It is a secure instrument that provides the admissions professional with a standardised data point; admissions professionals can be sure that this data point accurately reflects the capabilities of the candidate, rather than their advisors or consultants. Put together, a welldesigned test – that is truly predictive, reliable, secure, and demonstrably free of bias – serves as an anchor point to a fair and transparent admissions process.

Test plus The test can serve as an important foundation for admissions, but it should not be the only element. The admissions professional must evaluate not just the cognitive capability of the candidate, but also their drive, resilience, ability to communicate, and team skills. These are the more subjective aspects of the evaluation process, and it is this very subjectivity that can put transparency and fairness at risk. It is hard to maintain a standardised process when you have alumni conducting interviews in different parts of the world, as it is hard to fully eliminate conscious and unconscious bias from any human processes.

At GMAC, we believe that objective and evidence-based data points are the key to creating a truly fair and transparent admissions system. Standardised testing is important to this, but we must go beyond this. Just like the test provides an objective, and normed measure of a candidate’s cognitive capabilities, we must move beyond that, and provide schools with tools that help them evaluate their interpersonal skills, objectively measure their ability to not just communicate, but to convince, while eliminating bias and variability in the interview process. In doing so, we will provide increasing amounts of objective data about each candidate to admissions committees so that they can tailor their work to the unique needs of their programme. This will complement their art with the science of objective and standardised measurement.

Through this, we then help business schools create a cohort that is both compatible and diverse, yielding one of the most important assets for the school: an alumni club that Groucho Marx would be proud to join.

About the Author Sangeet Chowfla is President and CEO of the Graduate Management Admission Council.

GMAC is an association of leading business schools committed to ensuring no talent goes undiscovered.

31

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

32

The Engaged Scholar | Andrew Hoffman

The Engaged Scholar Andrew Hoffman seeks to inspire academic scholars to bring their work to the publics that need it, and to inspire administrators to make public engagement more acceptable and legitimate within their institutions; to enlarge the tent to be inclusive of multiple ways that one enacts the role of academic scholar in service to today's world

Why did you choose to become a professor?

When I feel myself losing track of the purpose or meaning behind my work, I return to this simple question. And my answer is equally simple – I want my research, teaching, and outreach to have a positive imprint on the world around me. Citation counts, A-level publications, and an h-index pale in comparison to that simple outcome.

Yet our reward systems elevate these metrics and they don’t come close to capturing my deeper purpose. So, that leaves it to me to decide what is valuable and important in my academic pursuits. I know that that kind of independence is hard to assert, especially when you are early in your academic career. But as you advance, you will have more freedom to exercise your independence. For me, I keep in mind the challenge from Jane Lubchenco, Oregon State marine ecologist and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), that academic scholars must abide by the ‘scientists’ social contract’ – that they have an obligation to provide a service to society, to give value for the money provided by public funding, government grants, and tuition revenue. It is an obligation that is born out of both a societal need for the expertise that academics possess and a recognition of the responsibilities that come with the privileged life that academics lead.

I am writing this at a particularly precarious time. The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on our lives and our livelihoods. People are suffering and society needs answers. Yet many people are turning away from science, distrusting its conclusions and its motivations, and even questioning its assessment that the virus is real. This is happening because we are now immersed in an array of confusing and conflicting messages that question facts, blur the line between opinion and fact, and dismiss formerly respected sources of information as merely political interests pushing a partisan agenda. This, according to the RAND Corporation, is the existential crisis of our time.

If we do not improve the scientific literacy of our public and political discourse, how can we make sense of the challenging issues we face? You can’t set policy or make informed decisions about nanotechnology, stem-cell research, nuclear power, climate change, vaccines and autism, genetically modified organisms, endocrine disruption, gun violence, or Covid-19 if you do not agree on a common set of facts to ground the conversation.

It is the existential crisis of our time.

If we do not improve the scientific literacy of our public and political discourse, how can we make sense of the challenging issues we face?

33

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

To my mind, this existential crisis lays the gauntlet at the door of the Academy. If academic scholars do not provide the kind of scientifically grounded knowledge that society needs, who will? But this societal crisis is happening at a time when the Academy is facing a crisis of its own. Academic research is becoming increasingly irrelevant as the work becomes too insular, the language too opaque, the journals too inaccessible and the cultural norms of disciplinary boundaries too balkanised.

We need to break out of our siloed research communities and bring our work to a world that needs it. In the words of former University of Texas at Austin President Larry Faulkner: ‘The antidote to irrelevance is engagement of the university with the real needs and aspirations of the supporting society.’

Not every academic must take on this role, but we need to make that path more acceptable and legitimate for those who do; to enlarge the tent to be inclusive of multiple ways in which one enacts the role of academic scholar in today’s world. Some may prefer impact in the world of scholarship, but others may wish to have more impact in the world of practice, bringing their insights and knowledge to directly solving the great challenges of our time. While both are needed, unfortunately the academic reward system steers people only toward the former. Even the book that I wrote about this problem will not register highly in my annual review because it is not “academic”. A-level publications are the coin of the realm. But if you want to have impact in the real world, you must take your work beyond the academic publications and bring it to the world of practice.

An illustration: I recently asked attendees of an academic seminar to raise their hand if they were concerned about climate change; everyone did. I asked how many devoted their research to the topic; most kept their hands up. I asked how many aimed that research at A-level academic publications; all hands remained raised. I asked how many felt that another A-level academic paper would change how society addressed the issue of climate change; most hands came down. This is the strange irony in which we find ourselves. And it is an irony that some have begun to question.

34

A new generation of scholars is emerging into the field with a strong desire to make a difference in the real world. My message is for them in particular. Whether they are new PhD students just entering their degree programs, young professors just starting their careers, or mid-career professors who have begun to question the purpose behind their work, my hope is to inspire a career path rooted in rigorous research but expanded with the goal of relevant impact on practice within society.

Even seasoned senior professors may find some value in these pages. It is never too late to consider the measure of your life’s work based on meaning and purpose instead of status, however defined.

My book does not summarise the entire field of public engagement. While it offers some coverage of the field, it chiefly focuses on the posture and spirit for adopting engagement as part of the academic portfolio. At times, it may stride into the domain of a polemic. But overall, it will be about amending the types of questions we ask in order to blend rigour and relevance, redirecting what we do with the answers to bring them to the attention of those who need them, and recreating the institutional structures for supporting and accelerating changes in how

The Engaged Scholar | Andrew Hoffman

we create and disseminate research. And it will be about offering hope. I have talked with many PhD students who entered their programmes with the desire to have real-world impact, make a difference, improve society, but after just a couple of years they feel pushed into a corner and toward disillusionment. I don’t want them to let the spark die. I want them to hold a vision of their career that strives toward the elusive “Pasteur’s Quadrant” where research is inspired by societal needs as it pursues the needs of both use and fundamental understanding.

Public engagement has been the goal throughout my academic career. I study environmental issues because I care about preserving and protecting our natural world. I earned a joint doctoral degree between the schools of business and engineering and was held to that goal by a committee of advisors that included business school professors who asked about the theoretical rigour of my work, and engineering professors who kept asking

‘what’s the point?’ For me, the point is that I want to see the impact of my work in the thoughts, values, and behaviors of those I reach in business, policy, and society. My work stands on the shoulders of the social theorists who came before me. But I use that theoretical knowledge to understand and change the empirical world, and not setting a priority to use the empirical world to contribute to theory within the academic literature. And as I have advanced in my career, the balance of my portfolio slowly shifted in its emphasis from academic to public audiences. I still write academic papers, but I write more books intended to span academic and lay audiences. I take my work to more public audiences through practitioner journals, web essays, radio interviews, and talks at business, government, and non-profit conferences. I’ll speak to high school students, senior citizens, local community groups.

35

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

I feel like I am fulfilling my purpose when someone approaches me after one of my talks to say that I changed the way they thought about an issue, or an executive tells me that I provided tools that can help them in their job today. I have the same feeling when my books appear in syllabi around the world or are assigned as required summer reading for incoming first-year students. Twice I have been invited to give a convocation address for first years and the satisfaction I feel in reaching those young minds far exceeds anything I have felt in reaching my academic peers in the seminar room.

In the end, these activities define the role of academic for me, and I want to encourage other scholars to do the same when the occasion presents itself. I am a tenured full professor and that means I can do anything I want. I do not intend to cease academic work. But this stage of my career is an opportunity to branch out into domains where I can have real-world impact.

Why don’t more senior faculty use the opportunity to experiment? In the words of one of my colleagues, ‘a problem with our field is that we have too many senior professors thinking like junior professors’. They chase the same publication counts that they did as junior professors because it feels safe. In the words of University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel: We forget the privilege it is to have lifelong security of employment at a spectacular university. And I don't think we use it for its intended purpose. I think that faculty on average through the generations are becoming a bit careerist and staying inside our comfort zones.

If we're perceived as being an ivory tower and talking to one another and being proud of our discoveries and our awards and our accomplishments and the letters after our name, I think in the long run the enterprise is going to suffer in society's eyes, and our potential for impact will diminish. The willingness of society to support us will decrease.

36

I have seen some senior professors who, upon reaching retirement, became embittered because their work was not fully recognised by the world. But I wonder what those professors had done to make the work known by the world?

Did they write articles in academic journals and think they had contributed to public discourse?

For the most part, neither the general public nor lawmakers read them. People will not search out our work in academic journals. We must bring it to the public. Other interests are beating us to the punch, publishing their own reports, often with a political agenda, and using social media to have far more impact on public opinion. Add to this changing landscape a rise in pseudo-scientific journals and we must face the reality that if we continue to write only for specialised scholarly journals, we become relegated further to the sidelines.

The Engaged Scholar | Andrew Hoffman

Why don’t more senior faculty use the opportunity to experiment? In the words of one of my colleagues, ‘a problem with our field is that we have too many senior professors thinking like junior professors’

As professors we have an opportunity, indeed an obligation, to bring our work to the world. I once heard it proposed that professors should, upon receiving promotion to full professor, be required to write a book that pulls together the 15 to 20 years of their research and aggregates it into a cohesive whole – a book aimed at a lay audience. What an experience that would be! It would both terrify professors and change the view that they hold for their work and its purpose.

The role of full professor is a rare and wonderful gift. Should we not use that gift to make a real and lasting difference in the world?

Should we not learn new skills and models for how to play a new role, and see our careers in the long arc that leads to that possibility? The seeds for that possibility must be planted early.

One cannot shunt all interest in engagement aside for the 15 to 20 years it takes to get a PhD, tenure, and promotion to full professor, and then

expect to suddenly reignite the passion. We must cultivate that passion while recognising the expectations and demands of the institutions in which we live and work. Then, when we are ready, we will have found the voice to contribute to society at a time when society most certainly needs us.

Now, more than ever, we need engaged scholars who can bring their expertise to the world, informing public and political discourse on the great challenges of our day. For this to happen, we need a more socially literate scientific community to engage a more scientifically literate public. We need scientists who can be effective communicators of what science does, how it does it, what it tells us, and what it means. We need scholars who can take complex issues and ideas and make them understandable to all demographics, young and old, poor and affluent, liberal and conservative. I hope that I can stir enough scholars to begin, or affirm, their journey toward that goal and in so doing make a difference in the world.

This article is an edited excerpt from The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World (Stanford University Press, 2021)

About the Author Andrew Hoffman is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan.

His disciplinary background lies in the areas of organisational behavior, institutional change, negotiations and change management. He has published more than 100 articles and eleven books, two of which have been translated into five different languages.

37

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Inspiring Corporate Learning Martin Moehrle and Steven Smith introduce the new EFMD CLIP Framework

38

Inspiring Corporate Learning | Martin Moehrle and Steven Smith

L

earning is a key factor of success for organisations in today’s dynamic business and societal environments. But how to ensure that your learning function is fully aligned with the strategy and business priorities of your organisation? And what is excellence in corporate learning actually all about? How do you get a fair outside-in view of your learning and development function that is not a check-the-box process but one that takes your business context into account, engages your stakeholders, and fuels your function’s strategic development?

These were the kinds of questions addressed

by EFMD’s launch of its Corporate Learning Improvement Process (CLIP) in the early 2000s, under the leadership of Gordon Shenton, its first Director. CLIP has since become the premier quality management tool for corporate learning.

It combines assessment and development of a learning function and rests upon a framework of quality standards. And its tested process of self-assessment and peer review allows the learning function to engage its stakeholders in a constructive dialogue on its current state and its future ambition.

Since CLIP’s inception, corporate learning has evolved remarkably. Continuous transformation has become the new normal within organisations, requiring ongoing reskilling and upskilling of the workforce. This has pushed learning from being a formal activity to become increasingly embedded into the work itself.

Digitalisation has also moved to the forefront, bringing with it the power of data analytics. This allows for greater focus on learner experience and the personalisation of learning. In addition, the combination of continuous transformation and digitalisation requires the learning function to synchronise its learning strategy to the business in real time through agile work practices, often drawing on an eco-system of internal and external partners to co-create solutions.

In 2017, a survey among the EFMD corporate network identified six challenges for corporate learning and six obstacles that need to be overcome to adequately cope with them (cf. figure 1).

2017

In 2017, a survey among the EFMD corporate network identified six challenges for corporate learning and six obstacles that need to be overcome to adequately cope with them

39

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Content curation

Digital transformation

Learning culture

Challenges

Agility

Being managed as a support function

Learning experience

Learning analytics

Too much bureaucracy

Inertia of the legacy organization

Obstacles

Measuring activities, not outcomes

Lack of new skills and new partners

Lack of investment in L&D

Figure 1: The transformation of corporate learning: from learning provider to learning enabler (EFMD Global Focus, 12(1), pp. 46–49)

To better reflect this new environment, EFMD decided last year to carry out a comprehensive refresh of the CLIP model of excellence in corporate learning, valid from 2021 onward. The now modernised and simplified CLIP Framework is structured in five chapters, each with three standards composed of four criteria. The chapter flow follows a clear value chain logic and covers all relevant aspects of a world-class learning organisation.

The first chapter covers the strategy of the learning function, its positioning, governance, and value creation logic. Chapter 2 deals with the target markets served and their segmentation, the connections with learners and their managers as well as the integration of businesses along the learning value chain. The learning function’s offer for its various market segments is the subject of chapter 3, including its cohesiveness, design, and deployment.

Chapter 4 looks at the resources that the learning function orchestrates, beginning with its own team and continuing with how it builds and leverages an internal and external learning ecosystem. Finally, chapter 5 addresses the impact of the learning function on individuals, businesses, the enterprise, and society, and the respective measurement and feedback loop into strategy (cf. figure 2).

40

Three transversal themes cut through all five chapters: digital, agile, and international.

The digital transformation pervades all aspects of corporate learning. Agile comprises responsiveness, flexibility, personalisation, among other topics. And the international mindset and connectivity of the learning function allows organisations to learn from and with the world, even if they have a limited geographic footprint.

The CLIP Framework takes a broad view of Corporate Learning & Development and covers both the professionalism applied in all learning and development processes and practices, as well as their grounding in business and organisational reality and their link to the company’s strategic and transformation agenda. The CLIP process continues to rest on the two main pillars of self-assessment and peer review, for which four peers from the CLIP community interview all relevant stakeholders of a learning function to then identity and give feedback on points of excellence, strengths, areas for development and considerations for the future.

Inspiring Corporate Learning | Martin Moehrle and Steven Smith

Strategy

Market

Offer

Resources

Impact

STANDARD 1

STANDARD 2

STANDARD 3

Mission and strategy Mission Executive Support Strategic Objectives Digital's role

Governance CLF's and CLO's mandate Governance system Organisational involvement Proactivity & agile management

Positioning Organisational positioning Support resources Contribution to Innovation Internationalisation

Scope Target market Centralised/Decentralised Alignment with internal providers Needs anticipation

Connections To business To learners To learners' managers Digital outreach

Integration Organisational involvement in learning Relationship management Exposure to external expertise International business standards

Portfolio Services & programmes & activities Alignment with other internal providers Alignment to target markets Digital tools

Design Learning Design & build process Stakeholders involvement Process agility & proactivity Use of analytics

Deployment Operations management Deployment methods Process follow-up International & Cross cultural deployment

Structure Operational model & effectiveness Operational agility Orchestration of informal learning Digital expertise & support systems

Team The CLF team Distinctive expertise within CLO L&D opportunities Team internationalisation

Partners Organisational positioning Supporting resources Contribution to Innovation Internationalisation

Measurement Data driven reviews Participant-focused Business impact Talent development

Organisational Internal brand image & credibility Employer image Organisational agility Impact on other corporate functions

Societal Sustainability Corporate Social Responsibility Contribution to knowledge development Reputation through recognition & awards

Figure 2: the new CLIP quality framework: 5 chapters, 15 standards, 60 criteria

2021

To better reflect this new environment, EFMD decided last year to carry out a comprehensive refresh of the CLIP model of excellence in corporate learning, valid from 2021 onward

The benefits of pursuing a CLIP accreditation remain unchanged. These include • internal recognition within the organisation, getting awareness and buy-in for the cause of learning, and the role and plans of the learning function among all stakeholders • contribution to the employer brand, especially as learning has become a prominent aspect of the employer value proposition • acceleration of the function’s strategic development, by validating and enriching the strategic roadmap of the corporate learning function • access to the CLIP community of forward- looking learning and talent development leaders.

The redesign task force was led by Steven Smith, co-author of this article and former EVP at Capgemini and CLO at Nordea Bank. Our heartfelt thanks go to him and all other members of the global CLIP community who so generously contributed time and expertise to this project. We are proud of the outcome and can already witness how the refreshed CLIP Framework continues to inspire learning and development functions around the world to join the club of those who have already gone through accreditation.

About the Authors Martin Moehrle is Director of Corporate Services and CLIP at EFMD, and Steven Smith is a Senior Advisor of EFMD

41

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

‘Sustainable Future’

Business school rankings have resulted in devotion and ridicule in equal measure since they were first developed, and yet they maintain huge popularity with prospective students and administrators alike. Simon Linacre looks at how the status quo could change by adopting a focus on UN Sustainable Development Goals

42

‘Sustainable Future’ | Simon Linacre

D

o you remember those far-off days when we actually went to academic conferences?

One of the many benefits we enjoyed was to meet a kindred spirit, someone who shared your thoughts and ideas, and who you looked forward to seeing again at another event on the circuit. These long-distance friendships often enabled you to develop something meaningful with your work, and also went some way towards justifying the time and expense the trips often entailed.

Such a meeting occurred at the GBSN annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal at the end of 2019 between myself and Professor David Steingard from the Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph’s University (SJU) in the US. He was at the event to present some of the work he had been doing at SJU on its SDG Dashboard (https://sdgdashboard.sju.edu/?page_id=22) – an interactive visualisation and data analytics tool demonstrating how university programmes align with the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At the gala dinner I sought out Dr. Steingard and asked him something that had been buzzing inside my head ever since I had heard him speak: What if you worked with us at Cabells and applied SDG reporting methodology to academic journals?

Cabells is a scholarly analytics company founded in 1978, and since then has maintained records of reputable, peer-reviewed business and management journals. Since the first hard copy directory the company published, the resource has grown into a fully searchable database of over 11,000 journals across multiple subject areas, but its specialism has always been in management sciences. Its

Cabells is a scholarly analytics company founded in 1978, and since then has maintained records of reputable, peer-reviewed business and management journals.

database of journals – now called Journalytics – includes information on citations, acceptance rates, publication times and media influence, and as part of its continual product development, new metrics are always being evaluated. As such, including information based on the increasing importance of the UN SDGs was something Cabells was keen to explore.

Prof. Steingard and I met again at Davos in 2020, and from then on small teams at SJU and Cabells have been working on a methodology for analysing and assessing the extent to which a journal has engaged with the UN’s SDGs through the articles it has published over time.

This has resulted in the new metric announced earlier in 2021 – SDG Impact Intensity™ – the first academic journal rating system for evaluating how journals contribute to positively impacting the SDGs (https://blog.cabells. com/2021/03/17/cabells-launches-new-sdgimpact-intensity-journal-rating-system-inpartnership-with-saint-josephs-universitys-haubschool-of-business/).

Using data collated from Cabells’ Journalytics database and running it through SJU’s AI-based methodology for identifying SDG relevance, SDG Impact Intensity™ provides a rating of up to five ‘SDG wheels’ to summarise the SDG relevance of articles published in the journals over a five-year period (2016-2020). For the first pilot phase of development, we chose 50 of the most storied business and management journals used for the Financial Times Global MBA ranking (http://rankings.ft. com/businessschoolrankings/global-mbaranking-2021) as well as 50 journals from Cabells’ Journalytics database most focused on sustainability, ethics, public policy and environmental management (https://www2. cabells.com/about-journalytics).

43

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

26

None of the top 26 journals in the pilot phase were from the FT50, and only four of the top ten were from the world’s five biggest academic publishers

It may come as no surprise to learn that the so-called top business journals lagged far behind their counterparts when it came to levels of SDG focus. For example, none of the top 26 journals in the pilot phase were from the FT50, and only four of the top ten were from the world’s five biggest academic publishers. In contrast, the journals traditionally ranked at the very top of management journal rankings from the past 50 years in disciplines such as marketing, accounting, finance and management languish at bottom of the pilot phase ratings. While these results were expected, it perhaps shows that while governments, funders, and society as a whole have started to embrace the SDGs, this has yet to filter through to what has been published in journals traditionally regarded as high impact.

There has long been criticism that such titles have been favoured by business school management structures over more innovative, real-world relevant journals, and this seems to be borne out by the results of Cabells’ research with SJU. The very notion of what academic journal “quality” means is fundamentally challenged when we consider how journals can make an “impact” through engaging the SDGs. So, what are the implications of this research for business schools?

Traditionally, business schools have been viewed through the prism of university rankings, which have become an essential part of the marketing mix for outfits such as THE, the Financial Times and QS. Metrics such as research publications, graduate salaries and employability have been the staple of such rankings for many years. However, some are concerned at the imbalance that exists between the importance placed on rankings by institutions and the transparency and/or relevance of the rankings themselves. A perpetual case, perhaps, of the tail wagging the dog.

44

The list of 50 journals used by the Financial Times as the basis for one of its numerous criteria for assessing business schools for its annual rankings (https://www.ft.com/ content/3405a512-5cbb-11e1-8f1f00144feabdc0) is currently under review after not changing since 2016, and even then it only added five journals from the 45 it used prior to that date, which was itself an upgrade from 40 used in the 2000s. In other words, despite the massive changes seen in business and business education – from Enron to the global financial crisis to globalisation to the COVID pandemic – there has been barely any change in the journals used to assess publications from business schools to determine whether they are of high quality. Rumour has it that the FT has been inundated by thousands of suggestions about how the list could change, so it will be interesting to see if the paper decides to do more than simply add another five journals, especially when the time seems to be right to embrace much greater change.

However, when the FT’s Global Education Editor Andrew Jack (https://www.ft.com/ stream/b359c1e1-f7ed-4239-816c1720f99df8b4) was questioned about the relevance of the FT50 and the rankings in general on a panel session in Davos in 2020, he answered that to change the criteria would endanger the comparability of the rankings.

The previous intransigence by the FT and other actors in higher education and scholarly communications was in part the motivation behind Cabells’ pilot study with SJU using the SDGs. Maintaining the status quo reinforces paradigms and restricts diversity, marginalising those in vulnerable and alternative environments.

‘Sustainable Future’ | Simon Linacre

Business schools – already facing an uncertain future from the fallout the coronavirus pandemic and looming climate change impacts – find themselves torn between sticking with the familiar metrics and rankings as a core part of their marketing strategy and pursuing mission-driven research which may run counter to these traditional measures. For example, what should a business school dean advise when a department head asks about suggested publications for his team’s large, multidisciplinary research project. Should she recommend FT50 journals to boost the scores for the FT’s MBA rankings, or should she recommend a selection of SDG-focused journals that will amplify research impact?

Adopting a focus on the SDGs and grand challenges is of course not alien to business schools, with many institutions keen to stress their environmental, social and governance credentials for several years now. Indeed, this push has started to inject a new energy into university rankings as well. A story in Times Higher Education (THE) in April 2021 reported

that the status of a university vis-à-vis sustainability was now the primary consideration for international students, ahead of academic reputation, location and job prospects (https://www.timeshighereducation. com/news/sustainability-more-importantlocation-mobile-students). THE then produced a ranking just a week later providing students with a ranking of universities based on their sustainability credentials (https://www. timeshighereducation.com/impactrankings#!/ page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/ cols/undefined). Aligned with the UN’s SDGs, the ranking is now established, and this year proclaimed the University of Manchester in the UK as the number one university with the highest impact ranking across all 17 SDGs, although it was somewhat of an outlier for the UK, with four of the top ten universities based in Australia.

If the story in THE was true and students and authors do want information on SDGs and sustainability to make their education choices, it is beholden on business schools – as well as publishers and the scholarly communications industry as a whole – to try and supply it in as many ways as possible. Worrying about how well the numbers stack up seems to belong to a world we left behind a long time ago – a world that some agencies seem to want to cling onto despite evident shortcomings. Business schools are forever talking the talk when it comes to sustainability issues and being progressive, but by ignoring the old game of rankings and embracing new games such as sustainability and climate change, they can move towards a broader encouragement of research and publication that generates a positive impact on bettering society. In turn, we should see academia and scholarly communications play their part in ensuring that the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development moves forward that much quicker.

About the Author Simon Linacre is Marketing Director at Cabells, having spent 15 years in publishing at Emerald, where he led the business and management journals division. His background is in journalism and he has been published in academic journals on the topics of research impact and publication ethics. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and international business and has global experience lecturing to researchers on publishing strategies.

45

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Effective thought leadership in Business Schools Vince-Wayne Mitchell, William S. Harvey and Eric Knight ask why, when we read newspapers, business magazines or social media stories, are so few business school academics featured?

46

Effective thought leadership in Business Schools | Vince-Wayne Mitchell, William S. Harvey and Eric Knight

E

ven though the range of sources and the volume of content on business and society is increasing, sadly, business school knowledge is not visible enough in public discourse at a time when we need authoritative and independent commentary to counter the growing levels of misinformation and disinformation, from elections to vaccinations, climate change and business models.

Fortunately, this problem presents an opportunity to inform and remind others of the high quality and wide-ranging research and teaching within business schools. It opens up a window to lead thinking and showcase evidence-based insights rather than anecdotes on business and society.

Along these lines, a recent letter to the Financial Times from the Editors of the Journal of Management Studies argued that research must be impactful to business and society, citing five different forms of impact: scholarly, practical, societal, policy and educational.

However, while this tells readers what impact is, it remains unclear how Business Schools can be more impactful. Moreover, there has been a move from an artisanal, guru-based thought leadership as seen from the likes of Amabile, Drucker, Godin, Christensen, Kanter and Kahneman, towards an industrialised approach to thought leadership that McKinsey & Company produces which suggests business schools need a radical shift in how they create thought leadership. Integral to achieving this is deeper understanding of what thought leadership is, why we do it, and how can we do it better.

What is thought leadership?

Building on our research we provide a consolidated definition of thought leadership as: Knowledge from trusted, eminent, and authoritative sources that is actionable and provides valuable solutions for stakeholders.

Although many business schools have the advantage of being a trusted and authoritative source, we are often let down in the second part of this definition. Much of what business schools produce does not match up to this standard since a lot of academic thought leadership is not actionable and therefore has not provided significant value to our major stakeholders. Even for leading the thinking of other academics, the evidence is limited when we consider the typical citation rate for articles, although these are admittedly a crude measure of academic impact.

This problem of a lack of actionable, valued solutions is also true of business in general with a 2019 survey of 1,200 U.S. businesses finding that only 18% of people thought that the thought leadership they consumed was ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’ in quality, while 30% rated it as ‘mediocre to poor’. This is a poor reflection of the way that many knowledge organisations have treated thought leadership activity. Both businesses and business schools appear to have fallen into the trap of generating large volumes of mediocre, inauthentic content that audiences find at best unhelpful and at worse intrusive.

Why should business schools create thought leadership?

The main benefits which academics and business schools reap from thought leadership come under 4Rs: revenue from students and philanthropists; recruitment of faculty and professional staff; research funding and partnerships; and reputation within and beyond the sector. With the latter, thought leadership in business schools has the potential to enhance brand awareness, and signal market differentiation as it is picked up by the media and recirculated and repurposed by individuals and organisations on social media.

47

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

More recently a further R has emerged: resistance, stemming from the increasing pressure from government to account for the value, usefulness and impact of higher education in society. The sector has come under greater scrutiny by government and one of our main offensive tools is to lead business thinking and indeed the thinking among government about business in a more substantive and overt way.

Although these extrinsic rewards of thought leadership are clear, they overlook another R, the intrinsic rewards of thought-leading academics themselves. The personal value can be significant in providing benefits to wider groups, including marginalised people, within business, society and the environment, for example reducing inequality, enhancing wellbeing and working practices, and contributing to the future of work agenda. To help optimise the impact of business school thought leadership, we suggest reflecting more carefully about whose thinking we are trying to lead and how we are creating thought leadership.

Whose thinking are we trying to lead?

The academic debate about leading the thinking of our stakeholders in business remains not only contentious, but problematic. Most effort has been devoted to leading the thinking of other academics. But with governments around the world questioning the value of this aspect of thought leadership compared to our social licence, public funding, and monopoly on degree awarding powers, business schools need to think laterally, be bolder and more diverse in who we engage with.

This means having a clearer focus on whose thinking we are trying to lead within our two audiences: practitioners in business, and those who we are training and educating: students.

Surprisingly, students have been somewhat ignored and we have underplayed any thought leadership work that results in leading the thinking of academics who teach via our teaching and learning content, and which promotes our teaching mission by leading the thinking about teaching practice as well as influencing the thinking and behaviour of our students. This has consequences for both academics and business schools in terms of responsibility and how we achieve that.

48

Revenue

Rewards

Recruitment

Why should business schools create thought leadership?

Resistance

Research

Reputation

As for practitioners, working with their academic and professional staff, each business school discipline should carefully identify which practitioners they want to engage with in their content and, more importantly, they should know why they are engaging with these groups.

The key here is targeting, which can be achieved as a sector approach (pharmaceuticals versus retail), a country approach (Asia versus Europe), a level approach (Supervisor versus Board level), or any other criteria which prescribes the relevance for the target audience. With targeting comes more information about specific practitioner audiences which enables business schools to create useful content that helps to build deeper and more meaningful relationships and more clearly demonstrate their wider economic and social impact. Next, we need to think about how we can create thought leadership for these target groups.

Effective thought leadership in Business Schools | Vince-Wayne Mitchell, William S. Harvey and Eric Knight

How does our view of creating thought leadership need to change?

The mainstay of our thought leadership still consists of research focused on our contribution to a particular stakeholder: ourselves. This demands painstaking attention to clearly defined structures, intellectual framing, research methods, theoretical contributions, and lengthy review cycles. Creating thought leadership for practitioners requires a different approach.

Regarding the resources and conditions required to develop thought leadership, business schools obviously need to draw on their scholarly expertise and research-led methodologies, which is essential for highlighting the evidence base. However, at the same time, they need to focus on insights from stakeholders and draw on the creativity of their wider community for insightful ideas and practical problems. The volume and range of groups that business schools engage with include: faculty and students, marketing and communication staff, alumni, advisory board members, and trusted colleagues outside the

business school community. These groups are a good starting point for providing honest and objective feedback on how useful the current content business schools produce is for them.

The outcome of this engagement is to move the focal point of thought leadership to contribution to practice, not contribution to theory. This important distinction of an intellectual contribution, which is driven and decided by the peer review process, versus the practical contribution, which is driven and decided by non-academic audiences, is clear but not straightforward to achieve. Unlike theory which relies on explicit knowledge and for which boundaries are well-defined, practical contributions involve significant tacit knowledge, which is difficult to identify, and the boundaries of the diverse array of practice are almost impossible to identify. This makes the question of contribution to practice highly challenging to determine.

49

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Tensions around operationalising thought leadership in business schools When business schools begin to consider how to more effectively manage the processes of creating thought leadership to move away from guru-based approaches, the issue is fraught with tensions. For example, at an individual level, how can academics balance the risk of thought leadership with the safety of thought followership so they do not damage their reputation or relationships among salient stakeholders?

Unfortunately, a novel theoretical contribution is not the same as a novel contribution to practice through thought leadership. With greater co-production of knowledge between academics and students through project and dissertation assignments, a further tension is how do academics balance using work which their students co-produce, contributing to their own thought leadership, with the restrictions of student confidentiality and intellectual property?

At an organisational level, a further tension is how should business schools decide which – and how much – thought leadership to strategically support through internal funds such as marketing, communication, outreach, and international budgets versus incentivising academics to focus on other activities such as applying for research grants or responding to media requests, which gravitate around agendas that are being set by other stakeholders? If they are to differentiate themselves then they have to produce thought leadership that helps them stand out from the crowd. A constant stream of unfocused content will not help business schools. This is especially problematic if the content is so esoteric that audiences do not know what it really means or how to apply it.

Yet herein lies another tension of how business schools effectively navigate between promoting ‘me’ (an individual academic) versus ‘we’ (the business schools)? Business schools are a collection of individuals, but can they stand for something more coherent?

Less frequent publication of high-quality,

50

accessible content that connects with target audiences is far more desirable than more frequent, lower-quality content that no one can apply to real-world practices. By increasing both the quality, accessibility, and usefulness of their content, business schools can return to the original, more authentic meaning of thought leadership. In the process, they will ensure that the content they share delivers genuine value to the audiences they most want to reach.

Finally, at the higher education sector level, how do business schools navigate longer-term knowledge advancement for academic stakeholders compared to the narrower and short-term interests of satisfying the immediate needs of governments and funders? A related sector tension is how do business schools balance the wish to share thought leadership for free, which is a central principle of civic organisations, with the commercial imperative to protect proprietary knowledge and to reap its financial and reputational returns over time?

What’s next?

The timing of business schools engaging with thought leadership is pertinent as questions loom around the real world benefits they bring.

Hence, it is more important now that thought leadership is a vehicle for business schools to enhance their reputation among students, practitioners, the academy and beyond.

18%

In a 2019 survey of 1,200 U.S. businesses finding that only 18% of people thought that the thought leadership they consumed was ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’ in quality, while 30% rated it as ‘mediocre to poor’

Effective thought leadership in Business Schools | Vince-Wayne Mitchell, William S. Harvey and Eric Knight

Individual level

Organisational level

Sector level

• How can academics balance the risk of thought leadership with the safety of thought followership so they do not damage their reputation or relationships among salient stakeholders?

• How do academics balance using work which their students might co-produce which contributes to their thought leadership, with the restrictions of student confidentiality and intellectual property?

• How can business schools effectively navigate the tension between pro moting ‘me’ and ‘we’? Are business schools a collection of individuals, or can they stand for something more coherent?

• How should business schools decide which and how much thought leadership to support from internal funds in a focused way versus incentivising academics to develop research grants that others are looking for?

• How do business schools navigate longer-term knowledge advancement for academic stakeholder benefit compared to the narrower and short-term interests of satisfying the immediate needs of government and industry?

When business schools begin to consider how to more effectively manage the processes of creating thought leadership to move away from gurubased approaches, the issue is fraught with tensions

• How do business schools balance the desire to share thought leadership for free, with the need to protect proprietary knowledge and reap dividends from it?

This timeliness is enhanced by the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation in public life, meaning there is an urgent need for evidence-based and digestible content on business and society.

There is a large untapped potential for business schools to be more effective in what thought leadership they produce, how they create it, with whom, for what purpose, and how it is communicated. In approaching this, business schools face three strategic paths.

First, do nothing and deprioritise attempts to be thought leaders in business and society.

This would seem to be going against a strong tide of valuing the importance of engagement and impact. Second, work with and learn from other knowledge-based organisations such as consulting firms who are currently much more effective at producing and communicating thought leadership to external stakeholders.

Third, figure out how they can do it differently and better by formulating a strategy for

thought leadership for planning, creating, communicating and engaging thought leadership content that simultaneously addresses the major problems of business and society, and complements existing research, teaching and other knowledge generating activities, building on a high-quality and legitimate evidence base.

We outline different factors that business schools should consider at the individual, organisational and sector levels where tensions can exist in investing, creating and sharing thought leadership. How will your business schools respond?

About the Authors Vince-Wayne Mitchell is Head of Discipline and Professor of Marketing at the University of Sydney Business School. @ProfVMitchell William S. Harvey is Associate Dean of Global and Professor of Management at the University of Exeter Business School. @willsharvey Eric Knight is Executive Dean and Professor of Strategic Management at Macquarie Business School @ericknight

51

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Business school advisory boards: increasing engagement, adding value Sarah Hardcastle investigates the inextricable link between advisory board member engagement and the value they add

B

usiness school advisory board members tell us: • they want to increase the value they deliver to their business schools • they do not want to be tick boxes or ornaments on a business school mantelpiece • business schools should ask for more help.

I want to share with you one specific School and Board that really stand out, particularly through their extensive interaction between meetings. Meet the Strategic Advisory Board at Birmingham Business School, the University of Birmingham, here in the UK. I’ve seen this Board in action on a number of projects and my thanks go to Chair Steve Hollis, Dean Professor Cathy Cassell and Corporate Relations Manager Andrew Miles for enabling me to highlight where and most importantly how this Board’s valuable impact is being achieved: “The Advisory Board provides challenge to the Dean, challenge to the strategy and really invigorates relevance for the Business School.

The feedback I'm getting is that it's helping them in their thinking, it's helping them develop a greater breadth and depth of insight to feed into their programmes and the way that they're actually interacting with the corporate world.”

Steve Hollis, Chairman Sorbus Partners LLP, Chair Birmingham Business School Advisory Board

52

The Advisory Board at Birmingham ticks many best-practice boxes including: • a defined role as a sounding board, providing constructive challenge and using its expertise to provide more practical help • clearly communicated expectation of active participation • a broad mix of mindsets, diverse in many ways including age, ethnicity and gender • establishing a Board reputation – people want to be asked to join • a pipeline of potential board members with specific identified expertise • tailored inductions and early introductions to academic staff in relevant departments • a strong Chair who takes responsibility for his Board and the impact it has “If you look at the diversity of it, it's a great forum to really create a lot of innovative thinking. I make it absolutely clear that we’re not here to run the School but to challenge constructively and bring our respective business expertise or whatever else to the benefit of the Business School and the Dean. My intention is always to try and make sure no one grandstands and to bring everybody’s views in so everyone feels engaged.”

Steve Hollis

Business school advisory boards: increasing engagement, adding value | Sarah Hardcastle

53

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Most importantly, there is a School team that is receptive to new ideas and constructive challenge: “It’s extremely helpful when Board Members share the changes they are seeing or making within their own organisations, particularly with regard to digital innovation. This provides us with an invaluable heads-up as to what we need to incorporate into our teaching to keep it cutting edge, changes in the skills that our students need to develop, and what new techniques and technologies we could build into our own operations and marketing.” Professor Cathy Cassell, Dean Birmingham Business School The high levels of engagement are rooted in the particular closeness of the Board and the School. New Senior Leadership team recruits benefit from mentoring by Advisory Board Members.

“Board members are drawn into the actual heartbeat of the School and that actually helps us bring more relevance through a much better understanding.” Steve Hollis I have written before about the bridge builder – the person working alongside the Dean and the Chair – facilitating greater interaction between the Board and the School. At Birmingham, Andrew Miles carries out this role and works hard to balance member engagement, ensuring members feel appreciated and that each individual’s valuable time is put to best use to help deliver the School’s strategic goals.

Andrew uses task and finish groups to focus on areas such as School marketing or programme redesign. He utilises specific Board Member expertise to lead these reviews, update the Board and even test out the viability of advice stemming from other Board Members.

Board involvement also gives greater credibility to project outputs in the different University approvals. These groups are then systematically disbanded after short focused periods to prevent Board Members being siloed.

54

H A R D C A S T L E &

A S S O C I AT E S Business School Support

Business School Advisory Boards Maximising the Opportunity

This is a programme like no other which looks to provide real-world experience for students – working with real clients and learning from experienced consultants in the field

A report sharing experience, challenges, solutions and good practice.

S H A R I N G T H E E X P E R I E N C E F R O M

H A R D C A S T L E

&

A S S O C I AT E S

Business school advisory boards: increasing engagement, adding value | Sarah Hardcastle

25

The University of Birmingham/Capgemini Community Challenge ran in 2021 for the ninth year.

This is a week-long, real-life experience where 25 students, placed in teams, work with consultants from Capgemini

I have highlighted examples below where this Board particularly adds value: Elements of Differentiation Two of the Business School’s leading initiatives stem from direct collaboration with Board Members: the University of Birmingham Capgemini Community Challenge for undergraduates, and the Birmingham MBA Deloitte Consultancy Challenge: two week-long immersive consultancy training experiences.

The Capgemini Community Challenge ran in 2021 for the ninth year. This is a real-life experience where five teams of students work as consultants, with support from Capgemini, to provide tangible business solutions for local charities.

“This is a programme like no other which looks to provide real-world experience for students – working with real clients and learning from experienced consultants in the field. We have a long-standing relationship with the University and I really can’t praise them enough. The Business School engagement, led

by Andrew Miles is first-class. Over the years they have proved themselves to be such collaborative partners and along with the University’s Careers Network, they have worked alongside us to improve the Challenge every year. I am constantly amazed at how much the students grow during the course of the week and the quality of the deliverables they produce always delights their charity clients. Running the Challenge is one of my favourite events of the year.” Billie Major, Corporate Vice-President Capgemini, CEO HMRC Business Unit, Advisory Board Member Programme Design Some Board Members actively engage in design and delivery of assessed programmes, enhancing them with real-world content that directly impacts student employability.

“HSBC was delighted to work hand in hand with the UoB to design the new module that was relevant in a business context, in real day, workbased scenarios and interesting for the students.

It was great to involve HSBC staff in the delivery and interactive aspects working directly with the students. A really successful collaboration for both parties.” Paul Szumilewicz, Programme Director for EMEA HSBC Paris, Advisory Board Member

55

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Research Impact Birmingham have utilised their Advisory Board to help deliver and measure research impact, creating a new impact culture: “A large section of the Board has helped the School develop its REF 2021 impact cases. It’s been fascinating – we’ve gained a better understanding of the School’s research output and given detailed advice as to how it it can be applied to create change and make its mark beyond academic journals.” Steve Hollis “All our impact cases are presented Dragons' Den style, in person to different Board Members, who challenge the output and extent to which it has been, or could be, tested. The draft cases are reviewed later, with Members providing written feedback on how succinctly and effectively the academic has conveyed and evidenced the impact.

We have seen cases move to a 4-star rating due to these interventions”. Andrew Miles, Corporate Relations Manager, Birmingham Business School With the 2021 REF submitted, the School’s Impact Lead and a Board Member are critiquing the process and identifying how the Board can engage from the outset of the next REF cycle.

“It's useful to ask the Advisory Board where they think the opportunities for real impact might lie, as some academics might want to incorporate that into their research.” Andrew Miles Most recently, Board Members have been involved in the launch and dissemination of the School’s Fathers in the Workplace Toolkit worked on with policy makers, and evidentially helping employees to navigate the options and considerations of shared parental leave.

Some Board Members have served for many years and still contribute effectively, so the School doesn’t want to lose them

56

Academic Consultancy The Advisory Board proactively finds opportunities for external tenders both with their own companies and more widely: “I was keen to put Birmingham Business School forward for a tender to undertake a review of the ESC’s board effectiveness, and was delighted when our chairman chose Birmingham in the face of stiff competition from other business schools. The report was a game changer for the ESC – providing 16 recommendations for improvement and constructive challenge and interaction between the executive team and the NEDs. More importantly, the report sent a clear message to Innovate UK and the government to reconsider the funding policy for Catapults having identified that the current policy hindered ESC’s risk-taking behaviour. As a Board member it’s a great thrill to be able to put the School forward for opportunities and witness the quality of its objective research rigour and delivery.”

Marc Stone, CFO KEW Technology (former FD Energy Systems Catapult), Advisory Board Member Quality and range of advice available Whilst Birmingham define a three-year term of membership, rather than specifying a maximum number of terms, they strategically manage the membership of their Board to ensure the optimum quality and variety of expertise is available when required. Some Board Members have served for many years and still contribute effectively, so the School doesn’t want to lose them. Active management comes into play when a member’s contributions have either dwindled, or there is someone in the pipeline that can bring new perspectives and/or expertise. It will come as little surprise that two of the Board’s more recent recruits are digital change specialists.

Business school advisory boards: increasing engagement, adding value | Sarah Hardcastle

I also believe that you should not underestimate the magic of chemistry: a team of board members who respect each other’s views and really know that they're doing something worthwhile.

“It's a real testament to this Board, that they truly value interaction with each other. At our October meeting they arrive early to network, attend our Advisory Board Guest Lecture, meet students and have dinner together before the Board meeting the next day. The Board itself has become quite a unit.” Andrew Miles “This is one of the few boards I am on that I genuinely look forward to. It is extremely well run, for a start, which in itself reflects on the school. We interact with the students when we can and are dedicated to their success. The quality and calibre of fellow board members, from virtually every walk of relevant business life, is second to none.” Anji Hunter, Senior Adviser Edelman, Advisory Board Member Board Members frequently speak to students about their: • areas of expertise • challenges faced and solutions delivered • styles of management and leadership.

So what is actually different about the Strategic Advisory Board at Birmingham?

The Chair, Dean and Corporate Relations Manager set a tone of real enthusiasm and clear expectations; Board Members all know that they are expected to deliver.

“We try to identify possible new recruits in advance and engage them in other activity to understand their level of interaction and build a rapport with them, before inviting them to join the Board." Andrew Miles

And finally leaving the last word to their Chair: “It's not about promoting your own career or satisfying your ego, but really making a difference to an organisation who are engendering responsible leadership globally through their international degree programmes and research.

You can see some of the mistakes they’re making and can actually learn a lot from them too. There’s an emotional engagement because you're dealing with interesting people who want to make a difference and it’s exciting to help them. It's a nice chemical composite that just works and people enjoy doing it.” Steve Hollis

About the Authors Sarah Hardcastle is Director at Hardcastle & Associates

57

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Enhancing business school education and business performance through intellectual property Christian Archambeau looks on why intellectual property is important to businesses and accordingly to business schools

58

Enhancing business school education and business performance through intellectual property | Christian Archambeau

I

ndustries that make intensive use of intellectual property rights (IPRs) generate 45% of the EU’s GDP (EUR 6.6 trillion annually) and account for 29% of all jobs (63 million jobs).

A further 21 million people are employed in sectors that supply these industries with goods and services. The value added per employee in IPR-intensive industries is higher than in the rest of the economy. Accordingly, these industries pay significantly higher wages: on average 47% more than other sectors. IPR-intensive industries also account for most of the EU’s trade in goods and services with the other regions of the world (81%).

Trademark registrations are often indicative of future business success, establishing a company’s brand and underlining its distinctiveness in the marketplace. Industries that make intensive use of trade marks contribute 37% to the EU’s GDP and support 46.7 million jobs. The EU also has a rich design tradition and is a world leader in industrial design. Design intensive industries have a strong economic impact across the EU. Industries making intensive use of patents employ some 24 million people and generate 16% of the EU’s total GDP and make a significant contribution in specific technology sectors related to climate change mitigation, the fourth industrial revolution, and digital transformation.

Understanding and managing IP for businesses and entrepreneurs will be key assets in the future Studies show a positive correlation between IPR ownership and economic performance and this is particularly strong for small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs). Overall, revenue per employee is approximately 55% higher for firms that do own IPRs than for those that do not.

IPR-intensive industries innovating with new technologies are expected to play a crucial role in pulling Europe’s economy out of the postpandemic crisis. SMEs are often said to be the backbone of the European economy. However, a large proportion of their contribution to growth and job creation is, in fact, generated by a small fraction of SMEs. These high-growth firms are Europe’s future industry champions.

As compared with other companies, the success of this small group of SMEs frequently stems from investment in innovation and intellectual assets, and their growth typically involves international outreach. IPRs can be instrumental for innovative SMEs to appropriate the value of their ideas and secure a return on their investments in intangible assets. Small businesses can leverage IPRs to secure higher margins, license technology, establish collaboration agreements, and attract investors.

Research has found that SMEs with prior IPR activities are more likely to grow than other SMEs. According to a survey carried out in 2019, the positive effects of IPR ownership for SMEs include improved reputation and credibility, increased turnover and better market expansion prospects. 54% of SMEs with IPR claim that registration has had a positive effect on their business. However, nearly four out of ten SMEs say that a lack of knowledge about IPR stopped them from obtaining the IP protection they needed.

59

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

At the same time, only 9 % of SMEs own registered IPRs. The main reason given for not registering IPRs is the lack of knowledge about IP and its benefits. However, the benefits of IP could be part of the solution to help SMEs overcome their initial investment costs. Therefore, familiarisation with IP can help companies make the most of their intangible assets. The earlier they develop this knowledge, the better, hence the need to introduce the topic at all levels of education, including higher education.

Why IP management education should be part of business school curricula Imagine that a group of business school students come up with a fantastic new business project, which unfortunately flounders before coming to fruition because the IP strategy was not considered from the outset. They might end up embroiled in an infringement lawsuit, which could easily have been avoided if they had researched existing brands and designs. If the students failed to protect the project, it could be overtaken by another company that then runs away with the great idea.

In 2018, the EU Member States agreed on a common European reference framework on key competences for lifelong learning. IP is relevant to all key competences, and notably for the entrepreneurship competence. Currently, the key competences are being integrated in national curricula and IP concepts are promoted from primary to secondary level education.

Education and raising awareness on the benefits of IP protection in the EU and its Member States among citizens, businesses, innovators, creators and entrepreneurs, is a key mission for the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). In response to the needs identified for bringing IP knowledge in education, the EUIPO launched the IP in Education project in 2017. A network of experts from the EU Member States’ education ministries and national IP offices (IPOs) was set up in order to prepare a common approach to IP in education. While the initial focus of the project was on creating high quality training materials, teacher training and a forum for good practices for primary and secondary education, there is now a need to strengthen engagement with other levels of education, notably higher education.

60

Supporting SMEs in Europe through IP As part of EU initiatives to help SMEs, the EUIPO is offering specific support throughout their start-up and scale-up journeys. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the EUIPO launched the Ideas Powered for Business hub in July 2020. The hub promotes the benefits of IP protection and provides information on trademarks and designs using clear, jargon-free language. It offers step-by-step fast-track routes to registration, e-learning courses tailored to SMEs and is the access point from which users can sign up for free, personalised IP support in their own language. In addition, the Ideas Powered for Business SME Fund 2021 was launched by the EUIPO and the European Commission with the collaboration of Member States’ IPOs in January 2021. The Fund provides financial support to SMEs with the aim of raising awareness and improving access to IP. More than 10,000 European SMEs have already benefitted from the SME Fund.

Enhancing business school education and business performance through intellectual property | Christian Archambeau

Connecting the knowledge triangle – Business, Education, Research Innovation allows small businesses to strengthen and grow, and at the same time employ more people who are better paid. All this will ultimately lead to a larger and stronger EU economy. IP plays a vital role in promoting innovation as it provides those who invest time, effort and money in innovation with a mechanism to protect their creative initiatives and benefit from them.

When it comes to creating the ‘joined-up’ innovation eco-system that we are aiming for, collaboration between the EUIPO and other key stakeholders is an important piece of the puzzle.

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), which has the mission of increasing competitiveness as well as sustainable economic growth and job creation in Europe by promoting and strengthening cooperation among leading business, education and research organisations, has recognised the importance of IP for education and business.

The EUIPO and the EIT have joined efforts in supporting SMEs and entrepreneurs through IP, innovation and education.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the EUIPO launched the Ideas Powered for Business hub in July 2020

All of the aforementioned initiatives and activities provide an opportunity to share best practices and expertise on IP and to facilitate networking between the EUIPO and the European Foundation for Management Development and its members. Please feel free to reach out at: IPinEducation@euipo.europa.eu.

If you are an SME or a start-up in the EU and you are interested in the SME Fund, contact us at SMEFund@euipo.europa.eu.

About the Authors Christian Archambeau is Executive Director of the European Union Intellectual Property Office

61

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Mothers doing doctorates part-time – why do we make it harder than it needs to be?

If universities really want mature students with families to succeed they’ll need to completely rethink the traditional image of the “doctoral student”. Widening access isn’t enough, say Sue Cronshaw, Peter Stokes, and Alistair McCulloch

62

Mothers doing doctorates part-time – why do we make it harder than it needs to be? | Sue Cronshaw, Peter Stokes, and Alistair McCulloch

D

oing a PhD is hard. It’s hard even when everything goes right with your research project and it’s hard even when everything is set up to support you through three-years of full-time study. Put simply, it’s hard because it involves an intensive period of what has been called the ‘highest learning’ and because it involves mastering the advanced knowledges and skills necessary to be welcomed into the relevant disciplinary community. It’s hard because learning and managing a long termproject is hard.

But doing a PhD is even harder if study is undertaken on a part-time basis (completion rates for part-time PhD students are woefully low), and if there are social and personal barriers which have to be overcome in addition to the requirements of high-level research learning and research writing. Because public and institutional policy and institutional process are designed largely on the basis of the stereotypical “traditional” student (young, full-time, and without dependents), studying as a “non-traditional” student may not be easy.

Despite diversity and inclusion now being front and centre of many countries’ public and business sector policy agendas, and particularly at the forefront of the agendas of most Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), many barriers to study remain in place and especially in the doctoral space. This is despite the movement to widen access to higher education which began in the UK in the 1970s and is now approaching its second half century. Even though women have taken up a greater proportion of senior roles and positions in organisations and have taken the lead in undergraduate participation, in doctoral education many barriers continue to fall disproportionately on this group.

The result is that, in doctoral education, one group in particular faces barriers to success – mothers doing part-time doctorates – and this group has been largely overlooked and has slipped past the attention of policy makers in both government and in the HEIs where doctoral study takes place.

Recent research lead by Dr. Sue Cronshaw has investigated the experiences of mothers studying for PhDs on a part-time basis to surface and explore the impact that doctoral study has on their lives, their relationships and their identities and, in particular the “unconscious” institutional policy and structural impediments and barriers that act upon them.

The fieldwork employed a qualitative feminist-informed methodology which allowed the lived experiences of the interviewees to be examined. The research revealed the voices and stories of systematically marginalised mothers doing doctorates and painted a concerning set of issues regarding perceptions of self as “students” and their feelings about institutions and the associated institutional processes.

The marginalized voices of ‘mothers doing part-time doctorates’ provides a new perspective on the “non-traditional” PhD student experience, allowing a deeper understanding of the challenges facing this community by identifying and analysing key themes of identity and peripherality within a framework of communities of practice. Despite the women coming from a range of backgrounds, occupations, life stages and stage of PhD study, this diversity was not apparent when listening to their experiences of studying for a part-time PhD. A clear commonality linked their narratives, bringing them together and reinforcing the researchers’ understanding that their perspectives were reflective of a significant cohort of women with children. The study provides an account of the experiences of thirty-five women encountering similar challenges and barriers to study and learning and providing reflections that may assist others considering embarking on a similar mode of study.

It must be acknowledged that the women identified many positive aspects of their study.

Studying for a PhD provided them with a means of identity expression previously stifled through the adoption of the role of being a “mum”.

Through part-time doctoral study, this sense of re-awakening provided women with a renewed sense of positivity and confidence both intellectually and personally, demonstrating a resistance against the dominant ideology that dictates women’s “natural” place is in full-time motherhood (Hughes 2002).

63

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

‘It just gives you that something other than being mum, you know what I mean? Because it can be hard, you know, some days when you fall out of bed and you’re running to school and doing twenty odd loads of washing a week, and I’m just trying to have something different from that.’ (Joan) Doing a PhD provided them with intellectual stimulus and allowed them a voice that the mother role had smothered. The academic development of the women helped them to see themselves as “worthy”, strengthening their own identity as they developed a redefined sense of self.

There were however, challenges when they were faced with combining their roles of mother and student.

‘I find it hard to still be” Mum”, but then be a student, be these other things as well. Because that’s what takes the priority, it always will.’

(Heather) These challenges of reconciling their various roles were made worse by the lack of institutional acknowledgement of their familial responsibilities. Despite embarking on a part-time PhD in an attempt to create new meaning to their current situation, their involvement in the PhD community of practice was peripheral at best, and this marginal position denied them opportunities for enhanced learning through knowledge sharing.

Much doctoral policy and practice implicitly draws on a Communities of Practice (CoP) framework suggesting that individuals move along a development trajectory from novice or “newcomer” and towards expert or “old timer” (Lave & Wenger 1991). This approach reflects a normative approach to PhD study – students begin the process with limited knowledge, then through interaction with other students, researchers and professionals and with the guidance of their supervisor they acquire new knowledge, developing a shared repertoire of skills and eventually becoming ‘master practitioners’ themselves as they achieve a PhD (Wenger 2008).

64

This normative PhD CoP process was not, however, what the women in the study experienced. A lack of in-group participation, tension between roles, expectations around motherhood, a fractured student experience and the management of their own guilt and lack of self-belief provided a very different reality of PhD study for these part-time students with a competing social role. Thus, the mothers were exposed to ‘marginalities of experience’, their competence never fully realised within the context of the CoPs with which they were nominally affiliated, due to them being ‘repressed, feared or ignored’ (Wenger 2008:216).

‘I had an induction thing and their focus was very much, “You are supposed to be in your early thirties. You are all supposed to be single; you are all supposed to be full time students.” Well, I’m old. I’m in my late thirties. I work full time. I’m a part-time student, they don’t know what to do with you. The attitude of the university is to take a one size fits all approach.’ (Therese) This marginalisation of experience resulted in the women not being included in mutual engagement of learning and the resulting joint enterprise that comes from members working towards new knowledge with a common goal.

This in turn, left them with little exposure to the shared repertoire necessary for learning (Tummons 2012). They felt excluded and not recognised within the institution.

‘I will graduate, and no one from the university will know who I am.’ (Grace) Management within HEIs has a responsibility to address imbalances within PGR experiences.

For the situation of this group of women to change, they must be supported to enable full, active, participation. This should aim to enhance their learning experiences in terms of their identity, sense of communal belonging, and the practice of PhD study.

Mothers doing doctorates part-time – why do we make it harder than it needs to be? | Sue Cronshaw, Peter Stokes, and Alistair McCulloch

The project’s contribution to current thinking around part-time PhDs is that, in offering a critique of extant normative practice, its findings illustrate and exemplify how existing processes marginalise mothers doing part-time doctorates.

In doing so, it points to the need for new approaches in practice. Understanding the needs of non-traditional cohorts considering and undertaking PhD study can inform recruitment practices of institutions who can tailor marketing communications, structures of programmes and training to different groups, rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach. We argue that a shift to the acknowledgement of diversity within the body of doctoral students is crucial if institutions are to be considered socially responsible.

HEIs have a powerful opportunity to learn from this work and develop practical responses to adapt and improve existing processes and infrastructure to support this and other groups of non-traditional students. The nub of the challenge appears to centre on identity building and connectivity. The use of online platforms alongside face-to-face events (research

seminars/ poster days) is a way to connect and involve remote students in “live” events.

We have had plenty of experience with such an approach during the COVID pandemic. We should continue to experiment in this space.

Other options include helping with the development of connections between doctoral students whose situation threatens to keep them in peripheral situations. One such option is the buddy scheme whereby two students in similar situations are introduced, and online communication encouraged. Research shows that sharing experiences and providing mutual support between individuals in similar situations can have a powerful cathartic effect. Another option is to set up easily assessable online forums for research degree students to encourage chatting and idea sharing.

Above all, university procedures and protocols need to be adapted through the adoption of more flexible, bespoke approaches suitable for mature students with familial responsibilities. Providing access to higher education and promoting the values of equality and diversity are unquestionably fixed at the top of contemporary political and institutional agendas, but while HEIs retain their traditional view of the “doctoral student” and build policy and process around that view, there will continue to be a significant disjuncture between the experience of diverse groups of doctoral students.

Yes – doing a PhD is hard, but sometimes HEIs and public policy-makers make it harder than it need be, particularly for “non-traditional” students.

About the Authors Dr Sue Cronshaw, Faculty of Law, Liverpool Business School, Peter Stokes is Professor of Leadership and Professional Development at Leicester Castle Business School, Alistair McCulloch is Professor and Head of Research Education at the University of South Australia

65

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

The virtuous circle of specialisation and career evolution Offering faculty better recognition and rewarding them for their actual contributions and for what they are passionate about, by Valérie Moatti

66

The virtuous circle of specialisation and career evolution | Valérie Moatti

B

PICTURE COURTESY OF ESCP

usiness schools are human capitalintensive institutions, and faculty represents one of their core assets. With increasing competition and demand for excellence within education, transformation of teaching formats and higher pressure on research output, business schools have invested heavily in faculty. Experience shows that faculty motivation is at the core of the quality of business schools as well as of student satisfaction (Rashidi, Zaki & Jalbani, 2016) The market for faculty talents, and specifically top research profiles, has become fully international and very competitive. Starting salaries in the leading worldwide business schools can be significantly over 100K€/year even in Europe and much higher in the US and in Asia, with teaching loads less than 100 or even 80 hours per year. While starting salaries keep growing, opportunities for pay rises within a given business school are rare. As a result, seasoned professors with strong track records in highly ranked publications, are regularly headhunted by competitive business schools offering very attractive packages and it is becoming difficult, if not impossible, for some business schools to match such external offers.

In this context, today it is more challenging than ever for deans to attract, retain and motivate talents and fully involve them in the development and evolution of a business school. It is also difficult for deans to build a sustainable model when most of their business (development and management of programmes, teaching and teaching innovation, supervision and coaching of students, etc.) relies on other types of resources, less committed to highly ranked publications but eager to invest their time and energy in innovative quality teaching, designing outstanding programmes, coaching and taking care of students. While a few exceptional professors are capable of doing everything simultaneously, this is very rare and often leads to distressful situations such as tiredness, dissatisfaction or even burn-out.

Overall it is very difficult to be excellent on all fronts (research, teaching and management) simultaneously. Rather, priorities and focus

often evolve over time for each faculty member (Harvey et al. 2006). An assistant professor with a tenure-track position will usually prioritise intensive research activity. This may well change ten or fifteen years later. In some business schools, the career path is formalised with evolving expectations at different stages.

For example, in some institutions, bringing funding to the school and developing outreach become key priorities for Full Professors as soon as they get promoted. Other business schools are creating or formally identifying different categories of faculty. In this case, the faculty is split into distinct groups, often defined by different cultures, backgrounds and behaviours.

Whatever the specific context or the system in place, fairly managing the different types of profiles, their career evolution, their preferences and competences over time is difficult.

At ESCP, we believe excellence and motivation are the keywords. We are also convinced that faculty perform and feel better when they can focus on what they are good at. Last but not least, we have a strong collegial culture with a valuable social glue. This is why we decided to design a new faculty management framework that will be able to: i) recognise different types of contributions and reward excellence whatever the field or activity; ii) attract and retain international talents; iii) facilitate the development and well-being of the faculty, and iv) enhance ESCP competitiveness and differentiation (among other methods, through further harmonisation of conditions across faculties in our five different European campuses – Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris and Turin).

The underlying principle is that complementary resources are needed and that faculty are more motivated and perform better when they focus on what they are best at. This also implies evolution across time as competencies and personal expectations are evolving with career development.

As ESCP, where culture is collegial and friendly, we started the project by collecting faculty feedback on the areas of improvement for faculty management. As the new elected faculty dean, I initiated this collaborative work with 15 volunteers

67

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Teaching / year

E

S

C

P

150h

100h

180h

260h

2 PRJ articles (at leas one B*)

Alpha* and A+* publications (2)

Impactful business publications including at least 1 PRJ

Teaching cases, Mooc, textbook, published teaching material or innovation

Citizenship

Contribution to student recruitment, supervision as well as responsibility for coordination

Contribution to student recruitment, supervision as well as responsibility for coordination

Contribution to student recruitment, supervision as well as responsibility for coordination

Contribution to student recruitment, supervision as well as responsibility for coordination

within the faculty representing all campuses, academic departments, profiles and generations.

After a short ‘diagnosis’, we collectively designed the vision and mission of the faculty and shared it with the full faculty before finalisation. Our resulting shared vision is: “A united and fulfilled faculty that drives the school's leadership to impact business and society in a sustainable way”.

We also identified key priorities for the coming three years at the faculty level and voted to decide on the very first priority which appeared to be “better recognise different types of contributions”.

With this as a basis, we agreed on the principle of revising our existing egalitarian model of faculty management (with a unique teaching load requirement for all, and research expectations mainly measured according to the number of working days) to enhance excellence and wellbeing while preserving our culture of inclusivity and collegiality. We decided to design a framework that will allow flexibility of time management between activities based on profile, personal preferences and career path. Such a framework should also clarify expectations for different types of contributions relative to chosen profile.

The chosen framework, internally called “My ESCP”, and elaborated through iterative collaborative processes involving all faculties from different campuses and different academic departments, offers four alternative “paths”, defined through ESCP initials:

68

PICTURE COURTESY OF ESCP

Expectations in research / intellectual contributions in 3 years

1. E, standing for “Equilibrium”: this path is very close to the existing unique model and fits perfectly for faculty members who wish to balance their investment in different activities (teaching, research and service to the institution). It is therefore the default path.

2. S, standing for “Scientific”: this path is specifically designed for research lovers who aim high in research having demonstrated their ability to publish regularly at the highest level. This path also helps to maintain competitiveness for research profiles as it comes with a yearly bonus providing research output remains at the expected level.

3. C, standing for “Corporate”: Faculty suited to executive education, high visibility among executives and larger audiences, therefore bringing outreach for the school.

4. P, standing for “Pedagogical”: Faculty most focused on teaching and teaching innovation.

The virtuous circle of specialisation and career evolution | Valérie Moatti

11

PICTURE COURTESY OF ESCP

The ESCP faculty evaluation committee – called the EFAC (European Faculty Advisory Committee, made up of 11 elected colleagues representing the faculty, the Associate Dean for Research and the Dean of Faculty

Whatever the path, a faculty member is expected to contribute to teaching and educating future leaders (core part of the mission of ESCP), to intellectual output and what we call “citizenship”, i.e., a concrete contribution to the business school service (supervision of students, management of courses and programmes, participation in committees and task forces, student recruitment interviews, etc.). What differs from one path to another is the weight of these different activities and therefore expectations in terms of performance for every activity. As digital and innovative teaching is increasingly at the forefront, we pay specific attention to this, specifically for C and P, but also E paths.

Additionally, we decided that for the S path, to replace our variable remuneration system – including our bonus policy for publication but also bonuses for responsibilities – with a significant bonus paid upfront to encourage faculty to spend their time on ambitious research projects rather than looking for other sources of revenue. This principle also helped to make our financial package more competitive for top research profiles.

Interestingly, our objective was not to build categories of professors with an implicit hierarchy but rather to help everyone to position themselves on a path where they can blossom over the next 3 years. Mobility between paths is embedded into the model and we have already experienced transitions from one path to another. For example, one of our P (teaching) profiles demonstrated the ability to develop strong relationships and visibility in the business world as well as publishing impactful papers.

As a result, he move to the C path. Conversely, another colleague on the E path (our default previous model) decided to move to the P path because he did not want to conduct academic research anymore. Both of them are now feeling much better on their new paths. In the future, we can envisage a young colleague spending 10 years on the S path in order to focus on their research, later switching to C to develop more connections within the business world, enhancing a broader visibility.

The ESCP faculty evaluation committee – called the EFAC (European Faculty Advisory Committee, made up of 11 elected colleagues representing the faculty, the Associate Dean for Research and the Dean of Faculty also elected by the faculty and headed by the Dean of the School) –meets every year to assess the performance of each faculty member and decide on tenure, promotion, sabbaticals, etc.

My ESCP was implemented in September 2020 as a test for volunteering faculty. About one third of the faculty has already applied and EFAC is following up those applications and will monitor the situation closely in the coming years. EFAC is also adjusting its current promotion policy to fit with the different paths.

The new framework will also guide future recruitment and helps us clarify where we want to go. The first feedback is very positive as it clarifies objectives for the colleagues concerned. We are confident that the framework will bring better rewards for all faculty, whatever their profile, and therefore consolidate our collective project of aiming at excellence and well-being. It will also help us to enhance our competitiveness and strengthen our inclusive and collegial culture at ESCP. Finally, these ESCP examples show that all business schools are facing similar pressures and challenges. However, each of them has to find its own way given their specific culture and context.

The future will probably confirm the value of such an inclusive and innovative framework.

About the Author Valérie Moatti is Professor and Dean of Faculty at ESCP Business School Sources Harvey, Michael G., Sigerstad, T., Kuffel, T. S., & Keaton, P. N. (2006).

Faculty Role Categories: A Dean's Management Challenge. Journal of Education for Business, 81(4), 230–236.

Rashidi, Z., Zaki, S., & Jalbani, A. A. (2016). Exploring the factors influencing faculty motivation and satisfaction in tertiary education.

IBA Business Review, 11(1), 10–26.

69

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

An urgent call for innovation in Business Education Whether students are making art for a famous museum or learning how to be a clown: there is no end to the possibilities for innovation in business education! But how can business professors become motors of this innovation, ask Kivanc Cubukcu and Svenia Busson

70

An urgent call for innovation in Business Education | Kivanc Cubukcu and Svenia Busson

I

n today’s business schools, professors are under pressure to “publish or perish”, leading most professors naturally to prioritise research and publishing over teaching. This imbalance between the importance of research and teaching is causing the pace of change in the world of education to be slow, with many classes being taught in a traditional, top-down way through lectures.

However, it’s clear that it’s crucial for business education to be innovating much faster in order to equip the business leaders of tomorrow with the tools and inner resources to thrive in a business world that is changing at a mind-boggling pace. The business leaders of tomorrow need to be able to lead their organisations through increasing levels of complexity and uncertainty, drive continuous innovation and change, and manage for positive social and environmental impact while driving profitability. Preparing future business leaders for this challenge requires business schools to provide transformative and innovative learning experiences that can impart key twenty-first century skills.

At LearnSpace, we work closely with higher education institutions from around the world and know that despite the challenges of “publish or perish”, there are many professors who are putting enormous efforts to create innovative and transformative learning experiences for their students. However, these teachers often lack time and resources to share their methods with the world, and so can go unnoticed outside of their own establishments. In order to shine a spotlight on some of these professors and their work and to inspire and support other business professors who wish to innovate, LearnSpace put out a worldwide call to nominate business education innovations across the globe. We received over 150 applications, of which we selected ten innovative pedagogies with the help of our distinguished jury, and published a report highlighting them. (You can find the full report via this link).

Takeaways for business professors looking to innovate Having reviewed and evaluated the teaching practices of hundreds of business professors, here are our takeaways that we believe can support business educators looking to innovate in their classes.

At LearnSpace, we know that despite the challenges of “publish or perish”, there are many professors who are putting enormous efforts to create innovative and transformative learning experiences

71

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

1) Professors are using a range of different active learning pedagogies that put students at the centre Engaging and active student-centreed learning experiences support the development of twenty-first-century skills, such as autonomy, creativity, and collaboration, which are key skills for future business leaders. Innovative educators use a multitude of different pedagogies, with game-based learning, experiential learning, and art-based learning among the pedagogies that we have seen being used by many innovative professors. Some examples of these pedagogies are the following: In game-based learning, students learn through not only playing games but by creating their own games. In experiential learning, students might, for example, manage the social media ad accounts of actual local companies, learning post-MBA job-ready skills. In art-based learning, business students might co-create works of art that are exhibited in a well-known museum. (For more details about these pedagogies, please refer to the Business Education Innovations report).

2) Personalisation of the learning journeys for students is allowing each to maximise their learning More professors are making efforts to personalise at least some part of the learning experience, which in turn leads to higher engagement and higher levels of learning for each student. Examples of personalisation include a game-based learning course where the exercises are designed for each student according to a specific pain point that they experience, or a crisis simulation course with 1000+ students where students in small groups receive regular feedback according to the different decisions they make throughout the course.

72

3) Great content is readily available, transformative learning experiences are not With MOOCs and other online sources, students can access almost limitless great content at no or little cost. So what will justify the high price tag of business schools going forward? One of the key potential elements of differentiation is developing unique and transformative learning experiences that can be found only in the classroom of a particular professor. We have seen that such learning experiences can help transform students both professionally and personally.

Some examples of the learning experiences we have seen were business students creating a piece of art to be exhibited in well-known museums in an art-based, intensive course; students being moved to tears upon visiting slow fashion establishments in their country in a hands-on discovery practice; a board gamebased course that encouraged students to test different leadership styles, try new approaches, and make mistakes in a safe environment.

MOOCS With MOOCs and other online sources, students can access almost limitless great content at no or little cost.

So what will justify the high price tag of business schools going forward?

An urgent call for innovation in Business Education | Kivanc Cubukcu and Svenia Busson

When questioned about the “why” behind all the hours of effort put into these innovative learning experiences, many educators have spoken of ‘the light in the eyes of their students’ at the end of their courses. The lasting effect of these teaching methods is gratifying to these professors as they know their work has brought about a shift within their students and has led to deep learning.

4) Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) topics are being embedded into the course design.

Having a multi stakeholder approach to business management – as opposed to a pure profit maximising approach that only takes shareholders’ interests into account – has been underway for a long time. The environmental and social impact of businesses is huge and can no longer be ignored by any business leader.

Innovative business educators are finding

73

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

creative ways to integrate these dimensions into their courses – such as using an art creation process to help students question topics around sustainability or an experiential learning course that partners students with local companies and communities.

5) While students are the centre of the learning experience, the innovation starts from the professor.

For professors to begin innovating, they first need to reach within themselves to discover their starting point and identify and address potential blocks.

What we saw from many innovative educators is that they start from their own passions when developing an innovative approach in their teaching. Areas seemingly little related to business, such as improvisation theatre, sports or board games, can be wonderful bases to build a course on. For example, a business professor uses improvisation theatre and clown techniques to teach ‘embodied leadership’, which can be applied when handling difficult conversations under uncertainty and disruption, such as performance appraisal talks or bringing bad news like firing people or making decisions under conditions of discontinuity and surprise. (More details on this, p. 29 of the report).

One potential block for innovation in the classroom is the professors’ fear of failure. Just like students, professors can be worried about trying new approaches in the classroom that may not work as intended. However, just like students, professors learn by doing and occasionally fail. We heard from the professors we interviewed that it took courage to try new approaches and there were invariably some mistakes made along the way but it was from their mistakes they learnt the most, and they recommend fellow professors to muster the courage to try new things out.

74

An urgent call for innovation in Business Education | Kivanc Cubukcu and Svenia Busson

schools, to make their innovation possible and successful. These partners might include a group of teaching assistants who help manage real-time crisis management responses, internationally renowned museums that agree to display business students’ artwork, the Olympics committee for supporting innovation projects or local companies and organisations opening up their social media and ad accounts for students to manage.

It’s important to highlight that fellow business professors are critical partners and great resources for educators aspiring to develop their own innovative courses. The professors we have interviewed were happy to share their innovative practices and learnings, and help out fellow professors in their own journeys if approached.

One potential block for innovation in the classroom is the professors’ fear of failure

Another potential block can be financial resources. Not all innovations we have discovered are simple to replicate. Some do involve a fair bit of time and resources. That said, there are a great number that rely on tools and products which are widely available and cost very little, such as popular Learning Management Systems or well-known board games. Finances are therefore not an insurmountable block for the implementation of innovative strategies, one must be prepared to try something different and to be creative in coming up with new approaches.

6) Professors don’t do it alone – it may take a village to bring an innovative idea to life.

It might be the professor who comes up with an idea but it is rarely the professor alone who makes their idea become reality. We have seen that innovative professors engage a range of partners, both internal and external to their

From “Publish or Perish” to “Innovate and Cherish” Business schools and educators have a big task at hand – preparing a new generation of business leaders who are ready and equipped to tackle increasingly complex and challenging business, social and environmental problems.

Old ways of business education will not achieve this. Business schools and educators need to start creating transformative learning experiences that will prepare future business leaders both personally and professionally for these challenges. Business education can and must rise to the occasion. We strongly hope and believe that these innovations and learnings can serve as an inspiration for this change.

About the Authors Kivanc Cubukcu and Svenia Busson are Co-founders @LearnSpace http://www.learnspace.fr/ businesseducationinnovations.com

75

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

The paradoxical relationship of Management Teachers to uncertainty Classrooms are unpredictable places at the best of times, but over the last year, teachers and learners have faced a whole new level of uncertainty. How can we live with this and learn from it, ask Michel Fiol, Kristine de Valck and Carolina Serrano-Archimi

76

The paradoxical relationship of Management Teachers to uncertainty | Michel Fiol, Kristine de Valck and Carolina Serrano-Archimi

W

hereas in the 1960s business and management teachers suggested their students should learn to master uncertainty when exercising their profession (with the help of management instruments like plans, budgets, and reporting), those of the end of the twentieth century rather invited their students to adapt permanently to uncertainty. In the first case, uncertainty was a constraint whose effects had to be limited, while in the second case it became a source of opportunities to explore new, challenging yet promising horizons. The rigour needed to control uncertainty was replaced by a need for flexibility in uncertain times. Today, business and management teachers agree that uncertainty had a significant influence on the art of leadership. Nevertheless, two previous currents of thought still coexist: some advocate the implementation of new management tools (ERP, big data) to contain uncertainty, while others recommend learning to live with it.

However, if there is one context that business and management teachers – whatever the business field – particularly dislike within their own profession, it is uncertainty. Research conducted in the context of the International Teachers Programme (ITP) confirms this.

Business and management teachers find it difficult to live with uncertainty in the classroom.

As a result, they try to master it while being aware that they are unable to do so. They then feel a double frustration: the strong anguish of being permanently confronted with uncertainty and the fact that they realise that they have a lot of trouble managing it. Few accept uncertainty as a challenging dimension of teaching or try to learn to cope with it.

This research has attempted to highlight the principles that underlie the relationships maintained by 88 business and management teachers of 28 different nationalities, of all ages,

gender and business fields, with seven components of their professional universe: 1) the department to which they belong (including colleagues), 2) students, 3) themselves, 4) the teaching task, 5) emotions, 6) uncertainty and 7) knowledge. The methodology for obtaining results was based on a questionnaire and an individual in-depth interview. In the questionnaire, each teacher was asked to rate the importance (on a 10-point scale) of these principles for them, first at a “principle” level and second, how they actually put this principle into practice in their teaching. Twelve principles were associated with each component.

Of the seven components studied, the most challenging component to deal with while teaching is the relationship to uncertainty.

Overall, the six principles relating to the need to master uncertainty were considered important or very important by a majority of the teachers; while the six relating to the need to constantly adapt to uncertainty were considered to be of little or no importance.

71.5% of the teachers state that control of uncertainty is very important or important to them, as it allows them to feel reassured in the classroom, to be able to devote their energy to the transfer of knowledge, to carry out the teaching scenario as planned in terms of time and content, and to have control over all the elements involved (content, learners, themselves, teaching material). 82% of the teachers find that their need to control uncertainty is constantly undermined in the classroom and very difficult to implement in practice. They feel disconcerted, even helpless, when confronted with the many events that regularly disrupt the planned progress of their teaching (e.g., students asking an unexpected question; students who have not prepared pre-assignments; disfunctional classroom equipment); they are unable to cope with them.

77

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.3 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

If teaching is understood as the preparation and implementation of learning situations, considering and dealing with uncertainty becomes an integral part of teaching

Faced with this difficulty in mastering uncertainty in the practical exercise of their profession, what can business and management teachers do to deal with it?

Those who can no longer bear uncertainty seek out opportunities to teach very small groups, in doctoral programs for example, where they have the impression that the true value of their strong expertise is recognised and that their pedagogical qualities of adaptation are less solicited.

Half of the teachers surveyed (49%) would like to further strengthen their control of uncertainty when preparing their classes. To avoid the negative impacts of facing uncertainty, they try to imagine the possible causes and anticipate the effects when preparing their classes. They are tempted to intensify the quantity of content taught, to raise the level of content-related demand, to over-structure the framework of their interventions, to reduce the possibilities of interaction with the learners, and to have a timing-constraint posture. Indeed, this willingness to control the whole teaching environment can transform rigour into rigidity.

Only 12 teachers (13.5%) recognise the importance of developing both attitudes: mastering uncertainty whenever possible, and also adapting to uncertainty, i.e., assuming it is normal that many unexpected events will emerge in the classroom, accepting they may be destabilised by learners' questions, learning to manage their stress in order to make interactions with learners more fluid, accepting confrontations of points of view, questioning and modifying the planned teaching scenario on the spot, or becoming agile in dealing with the unexpected.

In short, accepting their own vulnerability.

78

Finally, only two teachers out of the 88 who took part in the survey stated that they were able to put into practice both attitudes: control of uncertainty and adaptation to uncertainty.

They recognise these as opposites (i.e., a focus on the first tends to hide the other), but also as complementary (i.e., the two reinforce each other by mixing rigour and flexibility). Willingly flexible in the face of unexpected events, they recognise that this commitment to constantly adapting to circumstances can be transformed into a dynamic force in the teaching practice.

In summary, these results show the extent to which the relationship with uncertainty is difficult for these 88 teachers. Half of them hope to control it even more to avoid having to face it.

A small minority recognise that it is essential to develop both attitudes – both having control over uncertainty and accepting to live with it.

The rest feel lost, or deny uncertainty and suffer the situation with abnegation.

However, if teaching is understood as the preparation and implementation of learning situations, considering and dealing with uncertainty becomes an integral part of teaching. This process can be captured by

Those who can no longer bear uncertainty seek out opportunities to teach very small groups, in doctoral programs

The paradoxical relationship of Management Teachers to uncertainty | Michel Fiol, Kristine de Valck and Carolina Serrano-Archimi

integrating three approaches which address the different key elements of the teaching environment: techno-pedagogy, psycho-pedagogy and socio-pedagogy. Techno-pedagogy is concerned with defining learning objectives with regard to the audience, structuring a relevant and flexible pedagogical design to achieve these objectives, and evaluating the knowledge and/or skills acquired by the learners. Techno-pedagogy helps reassure the teacher by developing a clear learning-teaching plan as a reference to refer to without becoming a rigid framework. Having a teaching plan doesn’t guarantee that it will be deployed as expected and planned, which is why the techno-pedagogical approach appears to be a necessary condition for a class preparation by considering in advance the possible unexpected events that may occur in the classroom, but it is not a sufficient condition. The real learningteaching situation is made while delivering the session, and it will more or less deviate from the initial plan.

This is when the second approach to the learning-teaching process comes into play: psycho-pedagogy. Psycho-pedagogy has two components: behavioural and clinical. Both will help the teacher to understand and manage, in situ, the variables relating to the actors and their interactions. The behavioural component helps teachers deal with the conscious issues of legitimacy, uncertainty, vulnerability, stress, conflict and agility. The clinical component focuses on the unconscious processes taking place in the classroom. Finally, the third approach to the process is socio-pedagogy, which helps the teacher to identify the environmental, cultural and institutional characteristics that can either accentuate or reduce the fear of uncertainty.

These four insights from adult pedagogy can help teachers learn both to reduce uncertainty as much as possible before entering the classroom, but also to consider it as a source of agility and acceptance of our vulnerability in action. These have become even more important since the pandemic and the massive integration of online teaching, thus further increasing the levels of uncertainty for both teachers and learners.

About the Authors Michel Fiol is Emeritus Professor HEC Paris, ITP Co-director for the 2012-2014 ITP editions Kristine de Valck is Professor of Marketing HEC Paris, ITP Co-director for the 2012-2014 ITP editions Carolina Serrano-Archimi is Associate Professor at Aix-Marseille University School of Management-IAE, Director of the 2017 and 2018 ITP editions

79

Become a World Class Executive Inside China and Out CEIBS Global EMBA Ranked #2 Globally

No.1

2nd

6th

Stand-alone EMBA

Alumni Salary

Salary Increase

14th

16th

17th

International Course Experience

International Faculty

International Students

Executive MBA Ranking 2020

Contact Us Email: gemba@ceibs.edu Website: www.ceibs.edu/gemba

Book a one-to-one meeting with GEMBA admissions

EFMD aisbl Rue Gachard 88 – Box 3 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Thrive in this hypercompetitive environment

Phone: +32 2 629 08 10 Fax: +32 2 629 08 11 Email: info@efmd.org

Recruitment solutions Reach and evaluate the largest qualified global candidate pool interested in pursuing an MBA or Business Master’s degree. From driving brand or program awareness to lead generation right through to conversion, we will tailor a solution that addresses your school’s marketing and recruitment goals.

Media Reach global candidates early in the decision-making process with customized marketing and advertising

CONTENT MARKETING

DIGITAL DISPLAY

QUALIFIED LEADS

EMAIL MARKETING

LIVE BROADCASTS

FAIRS

NATIVE ADVERTISING

SOCIAL MEDIA

Lead generation Tailor your marketing message to the right candidates with our database of 500,000+ leads

Engagement Personalize your candidate interactions on and offline MEETUPS

To schedule a consultation, email us at gmacmedia@gmac.com

© 2021 Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). All rights reserved. Graduate Management Admission Council™ is a trademark of GMAC in the United States and other countries.

2019_GMAC_EFMD_ad_170mmX251mm_v6.indd 1

4/1/2019 12:29:16 PM