The 5 most innovative European Business Schools to lookout for in 2021
Business schools are arguably the best place to be to innovate a way out of a crisis. MBA programs teach you how to flourish in a volatile and uncertain world. According to a recent Poets&Quants article, these five European business schools proved themselves worthy during the COVID crisis by changing to newer and safer means to educate. The resistance to remote learning crumbled and investments in new tech was fast-tracked. Today, we’re looking at how these top five European business schools reacted to the COVID crisis and how they are helping transform business education for the future.
1. NEOMA in Paris, Reims and Rouen in France
NEOMA, a business school with campuses in Paris, Reims and Rouen, knew teaching via video conferencing was not going to be pleasant long-term. The solution was creating and developing a unique virtual business school campus. A Minecraft-like island with a campus building containing over 80 rooms, lecture theaters, classrooms, break-out rooms and offices. Then, students and faculty create an avatar that resembles themselves. These avatars wander abound the business school attending lectures, presenting projects, chatting and collaborating.
Interestingly enough, development of this virtual business school campus had begun before COVID struck. Alain Goudey, NEOMA’s Chief Digital Officer said, “We have several campuses, and we needed to find a way to gather people together, so we need something like this for our day-to-day activities at the school.” When campuses started to close down during the pandemic, NEOMA and its partners Laval Virtual sped up the development of this virtual business school.
2. SDA Bocconi School of Management, Milan, Italy
Bocconi which is connected to a wider university, already had its 30 online executive programs that were taught by the same professors who teach the MBA and MiM. Moreover, when the first big COVID outbreak in Europe spread through Lombardy in March 2020, the business school was easily able to shift to their online platform over the course of a weekend.
Giuseppe Soda, the business schools’ dean, is evangelical about the possibilities of hybrid learning. Soda said, “We are not going to see online substituting face-to-face learning, in the way cars supplemented the horse. The learning formats are complementary,” he says. While much can be done remotely, the face-to-face experience is better for the vital element of “problematization." This means that it is easier to disagree, and present other viewpoints in business school. “The plurality of perspectives is crucial to deal with the complexity of this world. You need to be able to join the dots,” Soda said.
3. IE Business School, Madrid, Spain
The jewel of this business school is their WOW room, which stands for “window on the world”. It’s a 48 square meter curved interactive wall which uses real-time simulations, holograms, and big data analysis. It also uses an AI system that reads student’s body-language to understand their emotions and level of engagement. It uses big data to analyze information in real time. IE has been using the WOW room to deliver online business school classes since 2016. This has been a head start for the business school to grasp the possibilities of remote learning.
But the business school isn’t only about tech, it’s also about embracing the latest teaching techniques, called “liquid learning”. According to Nick Van Dam, IE’s chief learning officer, says the business school is designed to “support the dynamic lives and unique needs of students in an emerging unpredictable, fluid, and fast changing world.” IE calls this liquid learning. This includes a lot of feedback, sharing, flipped classrooms, personalization, active learning, discussion, gamification, collaboration and other modern teaching practices. “One of the key themes for IE is always new worlds, new careers and new education,” says Van Dam. This month he will head up the new Liquid Learning Center, ensuring that everything IE does is suffused with the latest learning science.
4. ESMT, Berlin, Germany
This 20-year-old private university is grabbing the new reality and fondness for remote business school learning by the horns. The business school is launching a 100% online MBA that is very unique in Europe. “We’re taking a good look at a lot of the successful programs in the US and see how they’re structured, and they are generally much more flexible than what is currently on offer in Europe,” says Associate Dean for Degree Programs and EdTech, Nick Barniville. “What we’ve created is a fully stackable business school program. You’ll be able to buy the individual modules or sub blocks of courses as you go.”
This will be ESMT's first non-cohort-based degree program and it will be 24-months long. Students have five years to complete the business school program and students will pay a monthly fee spreading the payments overtime making it more accessible. Students will be able to add the basic courses and then add in personalized coaching or other modules. These modules could include smaller courses run by other business schools in their network. “We’re really giving people the chance to put together their own programming in a much more flexible way,” Barniville says.
As a result of COVID, EMST has spent half a million euros for the transformation. Kitting out lecture theaters, including in-desk and ceiling microphones, camera systems and screens. According to Barniville, there will come a time when students who won’t physically be able to attend business school classes. Barniville says, “So the investment we’ve made in hybrid is going to allow us to offer this type of format as standard for our classes as long as anybody wants it. We think this will be a strategic advantage in future.” He says further, “I think that there is room for business schools to be a testbed for new technologies, and one way of doing that is to incubate companies in that area.”
5. Imperial College Business School, London, UK
Over the past few months, Imperial College London was involved in the early stages of the vaccine development and epidemiological modeling This business school is intimately connected with the wider Imperial family. It has also become home to an EdTech Lab, which has produced many mind-blowing innovations. Innovations include a chatbot tutor and hologram technology that allows lecturers to appear in several places simultaneously.
When COVID hit, a Professor of Innovation saw the disruption and used this as a catalyst for long term change. He implemented a three-stage response – stabilize, enhance and innovate (focusing on innovations that will endure post-pandemic). For example, the “multi-modal classroom” enables remote and on-campus students to attend classes simultaneously. This gives business school programs a new flexibility which could appeal to part-time students. In 2018 Imperial along with four other schools created a company called Insendi to create online learning platforms to create new remote experiences. These experiences include adding asynchronous activities which promote social, experiential and tutor supported learning.