Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, in a recent article, wrote: “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.”
Technology advancements, innovations and the speed of current breakthroughs have no historical precedent. In Schwab’s words, “The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited.”
The impact of this revolution will be felt in every sphere. Education, specifically management education, will need to undergo fundamental changes to enable managers to be relevant and to be able to cope with the requirements of tomorrow.
The role of B-schools in such a fast-changing scenario will also need to be redefined. How can B-schools add value when students can access the same information as their teachers, sometimes faster? I see this happening in three important ways.
First, the role of B-school is to help make students constant learners and to kindle the desire for continuous learning as the pace of knowledge creation has accelerated. The ability to learn new knowledge and its application can make students as well as B-schools relevant in future.
The faculty member will become more of a mentor who can facilitate learning and help students to connect the dots to become an interdisciplinary thinker and worker. The role will be to encourage students to do self-directed learning and work in a team to solve problems.
Second, B-schools can be an important platform for entrepreneurship. Technology driven startups and entrepreneurship will drive innovation-led growth for India and the world. B-schools can become a platform of networking for entrepreneurship, for raising finance, finding incubators and accelerators and angel investors.
And third, B-schools can improve their education quality through the use of technology, the concept of flipped classroom, and longer internship for students. The use of social media and MOOCs can enrich the management programme in a much deeper way.
In their book No Ordinary Disruption Mckinsey consultants Richard Dobbs, James Manyika and Jonathan Woetzel emphasise that the world is going to be affected by four great disruptive changes, namely economic activity and dynamism shifting to emerging markets like China and India; acceleration in the scope, scale, and economic impact of technology; world population aging dramatically; and the degree to which the world is connected through trade and through movements in capital, people and information. Resetting the rules of the game must get reflected in the business school curriculum and how management is taught.
Management education will remain in demand as a kind of software to manage great organisations in an innovation-led global and national economy. With the correct software of curriculum, pedagogy and research that are going to be downloaded by B-schools based on the real requirements of students and society, we will be able to see the transforming impact of management education on companies in the next 50 years.
Guest Author
The author is chairperson, IILM Institute of Higher Education
