Two of the world’s leading business schools, Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Boston’s Harvard Business School, are really expanding their horizons. They are offering exciting, outside-the-box alternatives to traditional approaches to business education. Both are providing opportunities for students to experience learning which is more team-oriented, more hands-on and more focused on new ideas generated by the students themselves. Booth is doing so through an increased support of student entrepreneurship, while Harvard is doing so through increased encouragement of fieldwork and practical application of management studies.
Student creativity is fundamental to the Polsky Center for entrepreneurship at Booth. “I can’t teach people to be creative and have ideas… what you can do is create an environment where that’s encouraged. The other thing is you can say ‘when you have an idea, I can tell you how to evaluate that idea’”, affirms Steven Kaplan, head of the Polsky Center and professor of entrepreneurship and finance. Student creativity is being fostered particularly through a course in the MBA called The New Venture Challenge. This is in fact a competition in which teams of students present their business plans to entrepreneurs and investors. The prize: $75,000—not to mention the real-world business contacts and mentors the students will gain. The competition is meant to fuel student independence and innovation. Outside-the-box thinking is urged through the interdisciplinary nature of the teams: though they must contain one current Booth student, they may include members of other faculties at the university. Over the course of twelve weeks the teams pitch their ideas and receive “very constructive” criticism several times, until finalists, and then a winner, are chosen. The goal is to promote a new profile for MBA students. Specific business ideas and possession of the skills necessary to actualize these ideas are now being valued, as opposed to a more general knowledge of business fundamentals meant to equip students for a position within an organization.
At Harvard, a new experiment in unconventional methods of business education is being tested, and the 900 students arriving in Boston this summer are going to be the guinea pigs. “FIELD”, or Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development, is a two-year MBA course aiming to help students learn through first-hand experience and to “apply” their knowledge “with some measure of judgement”, as Nitin Nohria, the man behind the initiative asserts. FIELD is meant to contrast the tradition of instructing students through in-class discussion of case-studies written by professors. First, students take part in team-building exercises and engage in group projects. Next, students work for a week with one of 140 firms in 11 countries—and these companies sell a considerable range of products. During this week, students are also advised to do product development research off-campus, questioning customers and visiting stores in person. Finally, students are expected to, over the course of eight weeks and with a $3,000 budget, launch a small company. The company voted the “most successful” receives extra funding. Though there are those who are skeptical about this different, more applied approach, and though it will be complemented with time in the classroom, FIELD, along with Booth’s New Venture Challenge, are inspiring testaments to the creative new programs being implemented by the world’s top business schools.