Top 10 B-School Innovation in the World

Business Schools like any other place are always changing and evolving. During these times when the world is going through a pandemic, there have been several B-School Innovations that have allowed students to envision new ideas for studying management. So we have brought a list of the top 10 B- School Innovations that have taken place in Business Schools to challenge how we thought about them. To honor these bold moves and encourage others to do the same we wanted to share them with you. 

Top B- School Innovations

Read more to know more about these interesting B-School innovations below:

Yale University School of Management

B-School Innovation – Global Virtual Teams

Yale University’s School of Management launched a new required course in the core curriculum
which was unlike any other. Global Virtual Teams gives every 1^st year student in the MBA program a real taste of what it is like to work on a team across time zones, languages, and cultures. After the MBA students are grounded in team dynamics for three consecutive days, they are thrown into a virtual team to work on a project with students from partner schools in the Yale-initiated Global Network for Advanced Management. 

These B- School Innovations are integrated with the school’s core Operations Engine course. This new innovation occurred to the people involved when the students who came back from their summer internships talked about the challenges of working with others they faced in remote locales all over the world. The traditional preparation of the business schools was not enough and this will develop a set of skills in students that the market is demanding in the new world.

Asian Institute of Management, Makati, Philippines

B-School Innovation – Leaders in Innovation Fellowship (LIF)

AIM’s Leaders in Innovation Fellowship (LIF) is a public-private partnership that aims to foster the mindset and entrepreneurial capacity of scientists and engineers across the Philippines to help commercialize local innovations which would result in new investor-ready startup organizations.

LIF alumni have now founded startup companies and begun pilot-scale production of their products, have prospective third-party investors, and technology licensors, and are improving their respective government agency procedures for more efficient technology transfers as well. Some examples of these are given below –

• Telehealth device RxBox™ has been field-tested in 143 municipalities and is currently servicing 1,000 more throughout the country
• Vigormin™ is an eco-friendly septic tank system used for rehabilitation projects in Leyte and Boracay and now with an angel investor, a pilot manufacturing plant is being constructed.
• Investors are also interested in a guava-based wound-healing cream, tilapia sex-change using pine pollen to increase fish production, and a multi-sensor tracking system to prevent vehicle theft, etc.
• Ginhawa™ Ventilator and Smart Surface innovations are now startups 

Now the program expects to build on these successes and create a higher success rate of LIF alumni with investment-ready technologies and entrepreneurial potential. Their companies can spur the country’s inclusive growth and foster the transition of the Philippines into a knowledge-based and technology-driven economy. 

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EDHEC Business School, France

B-School Innovation – Teaching Factory

EDHEC co-developed multidisciplinary learning modules including negotiation, innovation, digital, marketing, strategy and consultancy, finance, human resources, global business, and many more with corporate partners and professors through the Teaching Factory, where approximately 2,000 students learn by practically doing work with corporate managers to solve real-life negotiation, innovation, and digital cases. The Teaching Factory’s corporate partners include many international businesses that are important recruiters eager to attract EDHEC students and are looking to build a long-term presence in the school. For businesses, the satisfaction scores ranged from 8.8/10 to 9.5/10 and loyalty exceeded 80% and for students, the satisfaction scores ranged from 7.7/10 to 8.5/10.

In these B- School Innovations, Corporate partners believe the best way to get close to students is to work with them in class and the EDHEC’s Teaching Factory is the only place in France to guarantee this objective to any company wishing to take up the challenge. They find improved brand standing among students, more applications for their vacancies, and better selectivity in placements. The solutions produced by these new-generation multicultural students also had a real business impact as Orange, Mondelez, and Nestlé would love to confirm.  

Canisius College, Richard J. Wehle School of Business, US

B-School Innovation– Canisius Enactus Partnership with Migrant and Inner-City Populations

Students of the Wehle School of Business partner with both migrant and inner-city populations to understand the challenges they face and try to develop possible solutions through several impactful student-led programs. Enactus’ three main projects include –

• Youth Entrepreneurship Showcase (YES) – YES teaches underprivileged youths how to start and run their own businesses. It began with Enactus helping underprivileged teens to create a T-shirt screening business. The business has expanded to 7 different locations and is planning to expand further into all Buffalo city schools.
• Refugee Economic Development Initiative (REDI) – REDI helps local refugees adjust to life in America by providing them with the tools to fulfill their entrepreneurial motivations. Enactus partnered with Evans Bank to establish a 30,000 USD loan fund program to help a local refugee open a grocery store.
• Sew-REDI – An extension of Enactus’ REDI project helps Bhutanese refugees and mostly women to earn income by sewing and producing bags, clutches, purses, pockets, and many other products like them.

Enactus’ programs have benefited both the entrepreneurs and the surrounding community. The Enactus students engaged in these programs experience a transformational impact and these experiences help students understand the challenges these populations face and the solutions that may exist through servant leadership.

HAAS Berkeley

B-School Innovation – Virtual classes

After the coronavirus wiped out the latter half of the 2020 spring semester at business schools around the world some schools decided not to get caught by surprise again like that. The University of California-Berkeley, where Berkeley Executive Education and the Haas School of Business are leading the stage of B-School innovations by preparing to unveil a major upgrade to Zoom classes this fall. Julie Shackleton, vice president of digital initiatives for Berkeley Executive Education says “We imagine that it might be more hybrid. 

Even international people, we might do some work in The Forum before they arrive and they have the in-person time and then we follow up. So it’s still going to be here. This is not a short-term, temporary fix for us. This is the way we’re moving.” And Mike Rielly, CEO of Berkeley Executive Education says Virtual classrooms are just the next evolutionary step, and “It’s nice to be a first mover,” He added “I believe as a business school, as a top business school, I believe Haas is the first to introduce virtual classrooms in the degree programs. It’s not something that top business schools have ever had to solve for, so it’s not that this technology hasn’t been in existence or ideal for this, it’s just that that wasn’t the pedagogical approach for being on campus.” And we think this innovation will be the next step in the field of education and will stay even when this pandemic is nothing but a distant memory.

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Toronto Rotman Pioneers

B-School Innovation– Use of video interviews

Toronto Rotman Pioneers is one the greatest B- School Innovations. Video interviews are such an essential part of the MBA interview process that not many realize they are less than a decade old. The technology was pioneered by Kira Talent, a Canadian startup and first adopted in admissions by the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in 2013. “We are a talent management business school,” Leigh Gauthier, the former director of careers and one-time director of admissions at Rotman said “We find great talent across the world and train and develop that talent. Big business employers are increasingly looking for applicants with good presence and communications. 

At Rotman, we do a lot of teams and classroom discussions; consequently, we are looking for a different type of student — someone who will be successful in all forms of communication.” Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Yale School of Management followed Rotman’s lead and video interviews quickly became a common element of the app process. Now this medium has become almost indispensable during these times of the pandemic.

Cornell Tech and Stern School of Business

B-School Innovation– 1-year innovative tech MBAs

Cornell Tech’s MBA program is creatively designed to deliver on the booming tech industry’s need of the hour – ambitious, intelligent, and young professionals adept in product management skills. It is a program for the digital economy where technology is transforming every facet of the world. Every student leaves this MBA program with a highly valuable toolkit for turning ideas into real products and services which is a core MBA function in many of the world’s leading tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

Stern’s Andre Koo MBA like Cornell’s program and a handful of others is a reflection of the widely shared belief that 2 years is too long to be out of the workforce and that B-school curricula needed major modernization. “People are less willing to take two years off,” Raghu Sundaram, NYU Stern dean added “They worry what they could lose in 2 years in a tight labour market. So I think that is one factor that is undoubtedly leading to a decline in applications in the last two years. 

The second is the international factor. It’s not only a fact that we have regrettably become more hostile to foreign talent; it’s also that other countries have now copied the U.S. model and have their own MBA programs. So the competition is increasing. I also think as business school deans we have to face up to a third factor: The cost-benefit ratio is not what it used to be. So we need to look into that at much greater depth.” So they think B-schools need to provide more options to the students including one-year models, specialty master’s degrees, and certificates. “The MBA is in need of some fine-tuning for the times,” he said. “But it is a program designed particularly well for people who are looking to change careers. It’s a wonderful model, and I think the MBA will remain a very important degree in the years to come. But it’s perhaps time to move from a one-size-fits-all world to multiple models” which is totally a very valuable idea in today’s world to be able to move forward.

University of Illinois

B-School Innovation– The $20,000 iMBA degree

One of the best B- School Innovations includes the University of Illinois’s decision to debut the first massive open online course-based MBA degree in partnership with Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based online learning company at the $20,000 price being a Top 50 business school was a breakthrough in business education. The school restructured its MBA program around core integrated themes taught by professors from different disciplines and made the new program the first ‘stackable’ MBA, meaning that the students can enter the program at any time and eventually build it into an MBA if they want, stop at just a certificate, or just leave it at one course. It’s a low barrier of entry for those who might otherwise not pursue an MBA but could definitely benefit from the coursework. This was the first time a single business school put its entire MBA curriculum online for free. Students only paid if they wanted a certificate for completing a course or a sequence of courses for college credit or the actual MBA degree which ends up costing roughly about $20,000, an affordable degree considering everything.

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Harvard Business School

Innovation – HBX Live, the future of the classroom

Ever imagined what the classroom of the future would look like? Many have tried to create it with video screens, cameras and even teaching robots. But after 3 full years of planning and building a unique virtual space, Harvard Business School truly invented the future classroom. It’s called HBX Live and recreates HBS’s dynamic case study teaching approach anywhere in the world from a leased studio at Boston’s public television broadcast center. The resource-rich Harvard undertook both the expense and the ambition to uniquely recreate a case study classroom to teach 60 people in real-time with no delays in voice or image no matter where you are in the world and does it while amazingly amping up the spark and vitality of a more typical classroom discussion. An HBX Live session seems more like a show than a class and is surely way more fun than a normal class.

The Wharton School

B-School Innovation – Pushing MOOC Frontiers

Taking advantage of the MOOC revolution the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has 18 separate MOOC courses, 2 specializations, and a series of related courses in business foundations and business analytics. Wharton was the first business school to offer a MOOC in 2012 and the first to offer a specialization on Coursera as well. The Wharton professors who have been involved in the initiative so far reported that it changed how they think about teaching their on-campus courses as well. The school’s MOOC strategy has not only elevated the Wharton brand around the world by allowing it to reach people who would never have had the chance to study on its Philadelphia campus it has also generated significant revenue for the school as well.

Top 10 Business Schools in the World

The top universities of the world in the field of Business are given below according to their QS rankings for 2023:

S.no	Universities	QS Global MBA Rankings 2023
1	Stanford Graduate School of Business	1
2	Penn (Wharton)	3
3	MIT (Sloan)	6
4	Harvard Business School	2
5	HEC Paris	4
6	INSEAD	9
7	London Business School	5
8	Columbia Business School	8
9	IE Business School	7
10	UC Berkeley (Haas)	11

FAQs

So this was all about the bold B- School Innovations which changed a lot of what we used to think about Business Schools traditionally. Let’s give these amazing schools the praise they deserve and use this inspiration to encourage more innovations in the future. To know more about these colleges, universities or courses check out Leverage Edu. Our experts are always here to help you in whatever way we can – be it guiding you in choosing which college you want or through the admission process to get you into the college of your dreams.