The Sauder MBA is in dynamic revision. Some would argue this is frustrating — others would say that curriculum always should be evolving and transforming in response to students and societal context. Whichever side of the fence you sit on, the Global Immersion for our Full Time MBAs had its inaugural run this past February. From the student and faculty feedback — this is a positive addition to our MBA experience.
Approximately 1/3 of the students headed to Bangalore, 1/3 to Singapore and 1/3 to Copenhagen.
Addressing a variety of MBA program goals of critical thinking, analytical decision-making, integration in a global context, communication, ethics and social responsibility, the following are the objectives of the Global Immersion:
- Foster the application of frameworks to which students have been exposed so far in the MBA program to critically address management problems in global contexts
- Facilitate the integration of contextual factors to enable students analyze situations and derive solutions to management problems in a variety of global settings
- Expand student learning through the provision of improved international, small class experiences that offer more advanced cooperation with international partners and allow global community immersion
- Help develop increased intercultural understanding and communications skills by allowing students to work alongside new, expanded groups of international peers that encourage them to challenge their boundaries even further.
- Create learning opportunities for students to be exposed to, and learn from, leading performance in other countries and think about how such leading performance can be created in different contexts
Steve Alisharan and I led the Copenhagen Global Immersion along with our colleagues at the Copenhagen Business School. This was a two week experience — the first week was about getting an introduction to Danish business generally through a road trip to 6 businesses in Jutland and the second week was a Business Challenge — where students teamed up with Copenhagen Business School (CBS) students and tackled the real challenges of 10 Copenhagen businesses. Will do a blog on each of these weeks.
As an introduction to the whole experience, we started with a day at the Copenhagen Design Museum http://designmuseum.dk/en — a fabulous introduction to 20th century design in Denmark and how it shaped the businesses of today. We then heard from CBS business historian Martin Iversen who told us a set of fascinating stories about the three entrepreneurs who over the course of history shaped Danish business.
More to come…