THE BUSINESS SCHOOL - ISSUES FOR A NEW FUTURE

2012

THE BUSINESS SCHOOL - ISSUES FOR A NEW FUTURE

PUBLIC NEXT GENERATION GLOBAL STUDIO

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00 Preamble 501 Business school innovations - Trends 602 Globally competitive, locally attentive 2003 Putting the business back in the MBA 2604 Case study: University of Western Australia 3205 Evidence-based planning and design for

21st century business schools 3806 A marketplace for ideas 5607 The Agile Business School: What does it look like? 6608 Superheroes of the university and workplace of

the future 7609 University grads don’t make the grade 82

Contents

The Business School - Issues for a New Future | Page 3

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The global economic crisis was one of the greatest assaults on global economic stability of our time. Going far beyond the trading floors of Wall Street, the crisis set sail across global shores and manifested itself into a life form that extended from a financial crisis, evolving into a housing crisis, employment crisis, a social crisis and a political crisis.

Affecting and perhaps destroying ‘everyday people’, the turmoil of the global economy has seeped into the walls of everyday suburban homes and has etched its way onto the ‘conversation agenda’ for dinner parties far and wide.

Whispers of a fundamental failure in business strategy, in very simple terms, has been tabled as the undeniable issue of the global fallout.

Business strategy begets business success, which creates wealth and security for the whole population; from health and wellbeing to the size and security of our ever-important pensions and superannuation.

So, where and how do we elevate business strategy for the future? As we cast our eyes to the institutions that are incubating our next generation business leaders, we as academics, researchers and designers seek to investigate the typologies in which our next generation leaders teach and learn. Are business schools grasping the power of place? Are they globally competitive yet locally attentive? Are they providing spaces that reflect workplaces of tomorrow?

With a unique opportunity to become the keystone of the contemporary university, business schools are in an inimitable position to steer business strategy and engage leaders for tomorrow. Unleashing the formulae of innovative design has become paramount to this success as institutions compete for the best and the brightest, aim to withhold a unique brand proposition and create undeniably the most innovative spaces to teach and learn. Our team at Woods Bagot is serious about research. We have selected topics for this publication that are both current and relevant to our clients. We trust the information contained within will not only inform, but may also assist with strategic vision definition for our clients around the world.

Mark KellyDirector – Education, Science and Health

00 Preamble It’s business as usual


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Business school innovations - Trendsby Matthew Lynch01

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Business management schools are currently operating in a unique global environment. They continue to face an irregular economic landscape, they are challenged with turbulence in global political terrains and they are presented with fundamental changes in cultural and societal values.

As such, business schools must attract enrolment from a global population of students that exhibit vastly different cultural values and generational preferences. They must maintain relevance in a battered but strengthened professional paradigm and they must aim toward a constantly shifting pedagogical target. They will continue to face similarly dynamic changes into the future.

Context

Globally, business schools play an important role in the advancement of broad societal needs. Business schools not only supply world markets with individuals that are highly trained in the field of business management, they also catalyse much broader cultural, economic and political developments.

As centres of academic and professional innovation, business schools offer the world new approaches to business by fostering original solutions to complex problems.

However, this global recognition of business schools extends beyond the contributions made by students and researchers themselves; alumni and faculty members hold equally important roles in the shaping of societies through their exchanges with business communities, the direction of their research questions and their engagement with civic populations.

From a national perspective, business schools play a similarly critical role, responsible for producing future leaders in the fields of finance, marketing, real estate and related disciplines.

Business schools make significant contributions to national economic development, policy direction and fiscal strategy.

These contributions extend beyond the revenue that business schools raise from international students. A report published by Access Economics reveals that tertiary education in Australia, for example, nets the country in excess of USD 14 billion per annum, but greater still are the regional economic contributions made by alumni for the duration of their careers upon graduation.

But perhaps business schools make their biggest impact on local communities, which benefit from increases in employment, cultural vitality and economic contributions.

As professional planners, designers, architects and consultants, Woods Bagot has considerable experience in shaping the physical assets of business schools with two aims: firstly, we use property-based solutions to solve myriad problems that inhibit a school’s ability to achieve its scholarly aspirations, its operational goals, its pedagogical ideals and its financial needs; and secondly, we craft property-based strategies to realise great opportunities that would otherwise be forfeited.

At Woods Bagot, we approach projects with these two objectives – to solve problems and create opportunities.

“But perhaps business schools make their biggest impact on local communities, which benefit from increases in employment, cultural vitality and economic contributions.”

01 Business school innovations - Trendsby Matthew Lynch


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Globalisation V2.0

Business schools have long been operating in an increasingly globalised world.

The extent of globalisation was most profoundly revealed in a recent study conducted by Ronald Wall, a researcher at the Faculty of Applied Economics at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Wall tracked almost 10,000 investment transactions that were conducted between Fortune 100 global multinationals and their thousands of subsidiaries. Of these investments, 82 percent crossed international borders; only 18 percent of transactions occurred within national borders.

This astounding statistic reveals the true extent of globalisation – a pervasive state into which MBA students graduate.

However, the challenges presented by globalisation have been changing. Most recently, the manifestation of globalisation in business schools has been materialised in two ways, both of which present fresh challenges.

Firstly, an upward trend in international student enrolment has characterised the business school industry over the past two decades. This, we know, is old news – the trend started with Anglo-American schools becoming highly attractive to international students during the early 1990s.

Throughout the following 10 to 15 years, foreign student intake increased considerably as business schools in Europe and North America became the most desirable locations for post-graduate management education.

According to The Economist, over a third of all students now enrolled at top MBA programs in the United States, and 85 percent enrolled at top MBA programs in Europe, are foreigners.

More recently, however, foreign student intake has been increasing in business schools located in developing economies. Schools in Europe and North America have since been competing on a global basis for the most attractive talent.

For example, business education in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) is currently experiencing a particularly rapid increase in foreign enrolment, according to the British Columbia Council for International Education.

In 2010, the percentage of GMAT scores sent to Brazilian graduate programs from prospective international students rose to 20 percent – up from 8.3 percent in 2006.

Ibmec, one of Brazil’s top business schools, has increased foreign intake from ‘just a handful’ to over 600 out of its 5,000 MBA students. Indeed, over 20 percent of applications to Brazilian graduate programs are from foreign students.

This means that BRIC countries are attracting both locally and globally sourced talent, placing them in direct competition with schools in Europe and North America.

Secondly, business schools themselves have been opening doors in international locations and partnering with offshore business education institutions.

As early as 1991, the co-dean of INSEAD proposed that the school operate three campuses in addition to its existing home in Fontainebleau: one in Berlin, one in Brazil and one in Singapore.

Over 20 years later, many of the most well-recognised business schools operate second and third campuses in other countries.

INSEAD was one of the first business schools that opted to open an international campus. In 2000, INSEAD acted on its original aspirations by opening a lavish campus in Singapore.

In 2007, INSEAD opened another campus in Abu Dhabi. 53 students enrolled in the pioneering class of INSEAD’s Singapore campus who came together from 26 countries – 26 students from Europe and 19 from Asia.

The culture of globalised movements continues at INSEAD today, where almost 40 percent of enrolled students now switch between the school’s campuses in France and Singapore.

Other business schools have preferred instead to partner with existing offshore institutions in place of creating their own. This is a less capital-intensive strategy and requires a reduced time commitment.

Since 2006, Boston-based Harvard Business School has collaborated with the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai to provide its students with executive MBA degrees.

Meanwhile, the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (USC) also partner with Asian-based business schools to extend students the opportunity to study overseas.

But this trend is not contained between American and Asian universities. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, has recently partnered with the Coppead Graduate School of Business in Rio de Janeiro where it sends students on a 10-week study period.

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WOODSBAGOT.COMAustralian Catholic University Centre for Health & Wellbeing, Melbourne, Australia

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However, the materialisation of globalised business schools has not arrived without its critics, who make arguments on two fronts.

Firstly, the validity of globalised education is brought into question, where the contextual value offered by local business environments and social customs could be lost to the pervasiveness of globalised business education and instruction.

These critics contend that while global models of education provide students with a broad internationalised perspective, these same students lack the ability to make regionally-sympathetic gestures because of their inexperience in the implementation of solutions at a locally-relevant scale.

Secondly, critics point toward polarisation between the models of education that exist within the developing and the developed worlds. This issue has most recently come to a head as the three most well-recognised institutions for business school accreditation (AACSB, AMBA and EQUIS) have started to realise the lost opportunity in ignoring schools within developing countries.

Few schools outside of the Western world maintain accreditation from these three institutions – a clear indication that polarisation exists in the standards, priorities and models preferred by western and non-western business schools.

For example, less than 2.5 percent of business schools in China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico, Brazil and the Philippines maintain AACSB accreditation.

Analysts attribute this phenomenon to the increasing irrelevance of an accreditation system that was originally developed in 1919 for Westernised schools in high-income countries in North America and Europe.

Even though AACSB maintains over 1,000 member business and management schools in more than 70 countries, there are thousands of business schools that have been developed in emerging economies within the past decade that do not necessarily subscribe to the models of education accepted and promoted in the Western world. Indeed, only 5 percent of business schools worldwide maintain AACSB accreditation, most of which are US-based.

John Fernandes, President and Chief Executive of AACSB International, recognises this global shift away from the historical Western-centric model:“Even with AACSB’s significant growth since its globalisation policy was adopted in September 2000, we still have lots of room to grow, especially in the developing world, before we can truly say we have achieved our mission... One difficult challenge is the ineffectiveness of our primary product, business school accreditation, in meeting the developing world’s needs.”

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“Business schools themselves have been opening doors in international locations and partnering with offshore business education institutions.”

Fernandes’ recognition of this shift clearly demonstrates the need for business schools to concentrate on the future needs of management education as it decentralises away from the Western world.

Thierry Grange, Dean at Grenoble Ecole de Management, who has recently been appointed co-chairman of a committee of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, agrees. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Grange shared his thoughts: “We have been American-o-centric for decades. Since 2000 you have had a revolution. Business education is booming, and more and more schools in China, Asia and Europe are saying ‘We think we are a good institution. We would like to apply to become accredited.’ This aspect of globalisation calls for a reconsideration of what we do.”

This move away from an Anglo-American model has been attracting even more attention from business schools since the onset of the global financial crisis.

Amidst local economic concerns, American and European business and management schools have struggled to maintain global competitiveness, especially as international applications have considerably weakened.

For example, the proportion of Asian students who apply to American business schools has dropped significantly over the past decade: of the Asian students who took the GMAT in 2001, 85 percent then went on to apply to American business schools; this proportion had dropped to 67 percent in 2009. Anglo-American business management schools have since needed to increase their global competitiveness as foreign students start to consider their options for education locally.

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A recent article published in The Economist goes a long way toward explaining the phenomenon of the decreased global competitiveness of business schools in the US and Europe.

Business education in the US has historically been highly introverted, with almost all case studies featuring American examples.

A similar approach has been taken in European business schools, which have focused intently on European case studies. But as business education becomes more global, it is becoming less centralised on Anglo-American industry.

Now, more than a third of the case studies taught in strategy courses in US universities feature foreign examples – an effort designed specifically to respond to globalisation and to attract foreign students.

Reversing antiquated teaching trends

This Anglo-American model of business education has also typically been highly siloed in its approach to teaching methods.

A business and management school teaches business and management; psychology students learn psychology; and a school of medicine teaches medicine. But while schools of psychology create psychologists and schools of medicine create doctors, business schools are in the business of creating future business leaders in disciplines as far afield as marketing, real estate, policy and finance.

Up until recently, there had been little discussion of how best to create an environment in which leadership could be forged under one roof with such disparate learning aspirations and outcomes.

So, schools and subjects have typically been arranged vertically in a top-down, faculty-led approach. Little horizontal integration between subjects has existed; a bottom-up approach has been resisted; and a student-centred approach has been denied.

Cross-sector research has been the responsibility of students themselves with little support or encouragement and this siloed approach to teaching has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. ‘A guide to work-based learning’ contends that most MBA schools still focus on the same theory and analytics that they did 50 years ago. Not much integration exists between MBA schools and the other academic departments that operate within the same institution.


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The University of Melbourne School of Engineering Student Learning Centre, Melbourne, Australia

And while collaboration with other institutions, such as the partnerships between the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Columbia Business School at Columbia University, offer a degree of cross-pollination, these initiatives do not substitute inter-departmental collaborative efforts.

And because curriculum has been faculty-led, teaching has been rigorously academic in its approach. This makes little sense: while business schools realise the need for discipline-based research, industry-based scholarship and peer-led learning, most schools remain tied to the academic tradition of teacher-led learning.

Under this model of teaching, students stay on campus for the duration of their designated class, after which they immediately relocate to a more productive environment – a cafe, a library, their home.

Students are tied to tiered classrooms which are clearly inappropriate for much of the student-led discussion, knowledge-sharing and learning that characterises contemporary pedagogies.

Students leave campus periodically to pursue what is unavailable to them within their own facility – food, entertainment, business facilities, outdoor areas, childcare facilities and myriad other amenities.

Students seldom interact with their contemporaries in other departments – they don’t talk to the medical students, the architecture post-grads or the engineering community.

Meanwhile, the most contemporary and forward-looking facilities offer their students a completely different environment and learning experience. Students want to stay within the business school because it has been activated 24 hours, 7 days a week. It has become the hub of activity, the place where things happen.

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Students practice trading on international exchanges throughout the night in state-of-the-art trading facilities. Brunch is served until 3:00pm; dinner until 2:00am. There are myriad areas set up for any kind of interaction – a spontaneous encounter with a professor, a quick game of chess with a colleague, a conference room for a live video chat with a potential international employer, a last-minute 15 minute preparation session to run through a mock sales presentation.

It is what the University of Technology, Sydney, calls a ‘sticky campus’ – a place that bonds together learning with teaching, entertainment with knowledge, and students with teachers. It is porous, inviting, diverse and exciting.

But it’s not only students that are being affected by these contemporary trends. The rules for the planning, design and implementation of academic workplaces for faculty and researchers are also being rewritten.

Trends in the design of academic workplaces are being influenced by the emerging movements in professional workplaces – the fundamental theories behind academic workplaces are similar to those that have been recently recognised in the professional workplace.

This is most evident in some of the largest, most profitable and most savvy organisations around the globe, which are reaping big benefits from their investment in redefining how, when and where their employees work.

Simply put, these businesses – which include Microsoft, Rabobank, Macquarie Group, Interpolis and SABIC – want workplaces that allow unobstructed collaboration, unrestricted mobility and seamless communication.

They are removing enclosed offices, server equipment, outdated technologies and anything else that obstructs an employee from communicating physically with colleagues or accessing virtual knowledge.

The aim is to allow employees to collaborate, innovate and create. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these phenomenon increase efficiency, increase effectiveness and positively impact the corporate bottom line.

So, too, are academic workplaces being reinvented.

Building 5 Block A&B, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia


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Until recently, the design of academic workplaces has stayed much the same over the past half century. Academics are typically assigned enclosed offices, the size of which depends largely on their academic status and their seniority. The majority of academics at tertiary institutions still reside in these cells. This, if anything, has increased in recent years with the steady squeeze on common areas which were once the domain of the experience of collegiate life.

But, as has been observed in the professional workplace, significant advancements and efficiencies can be made by tweaking these designs. Academic workplaces around the globe have recently been making significant changes to the way they operate.

Academics no longer necessarily need enclosed offices – these spaces were designed for quiet activity.

Researchers no longer need permanent offices – these spaces were used to encourage the accumulation and storage of paper-based knowledge materials in the form of books and papers.

And professors no longer need large offices – these spaces were designed for individual use as well as meetings with other academics.

Instead, academics, researchers and teachers are accessing much of their material online, they are collaborating with other academics and they are engaging with content in the form of video and audio. If they need a quiet space, they can use a small meeting room. If they need to meet with colleagues they can use a conference room. Should they need to engage virtually with remotely-based colleagues, they can use video or teleconferencing facilities.

The key difference is that academics no longer necessarily need their own designated offices – Woods Bagot has observed that they are able to work with even greater efficiency, greater effectiveness and even greater confidence from a variety of other work settings.

These trends can reasonably be expected to continue into the foreseeable future. The extent to which they will affect and advance global business schools largely depends on an institution’s willingness to embrace these trends as necessary step toward achieving future target enrolments, retaining high-quality students, procuring excellent teachers and producing effective alumni. Moreover, the effect that these trends will have on the physical infrastructure of a business school is of equal excitement – the ways in which the most successful business schools will be planned, designed, built, operated and managed must be negotiated carefully to ensure that these pervasive trends are not ignored.

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– http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/25a79a4e-a252-11e0-bb06-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a9543bac-edcc-11db-8584-000b5df10621.html#axzz1VtoKsYtQ – http://www.mydigitalfc.com/news/gateway-riches-324 – http://english.eastday.com/e/110825/u1a6071375.html – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_simulation – http://www.economist.com/whichmba?page=1 – http://mbaoath.org – http://universityfinancelab.com/photo-gallery

References

– http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/world/europe/27iht-educLede27.html – http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/3817239/article-Russian-MBA-program-tackles-real-world-hassles – http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/stories/2010/03/08/focus1.html – http://www.economist.com/node/16208000 – http://www.coydavidson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/110727_GIST_The_Mobile_Worker4.png – http://www.futureofcities.ox.ac.uk

– http://www.economist.com/node/18802722 – http://english.eastday.com/e/110825/u1a6071375.html – http://www.capitalvue.com/home/CE-news/inset/@10063/post/3158313 – http://www.mbaworld.com/blr-archive/mba-market/6/index.htm – http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-diary-was-it-worth-it – http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/05/higher-education_bubble – http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/05/the_business_school_tuition_bubble.html

University of Adelaide, First Year Learning Centre, Adelaide, Australia,

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University of South Australia Future Learning Space, Adelaide, Australia

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Globally competitive, locally attentive by Matthew Lynch02

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A number of management schools have begun to articulate responses that capitalise on the trend toward globalisation, but which simultaneously attenuate the pervasive global paradigm with a locally-specific value proposition.

INSEAD, for example, now offers field work in the Middle East, China and India that deals with locally-specific issues such as health, corruption and direct investment.

These initiatives recognise the importance of the gradual shift in global business industries away from an Anglo-American focus. They understand the importance of an approach that takes into account the needs and aspirations of developing economies and local markets.

But the manifestation of globalisation in the business school industry – increased foreign student intake, international campuses and global models of cooperation between business schools – will also have substantial implications on the way business schools are strategically planned and spatially designed.

The location of business schools; the facilities that they offer; the design of teaching spaces; the increasing need for ancillary spaces; and the ways in which these facilities are operated are necessarily changing in response to globalised trends.

So, what can property professionals expect? And how can they respond appropriately to the professional and academic sectors that are taking a more global approach?

The key take-away message to professionals responsible for property-based decisions at business schools is that the planning, design and operation of school facilities needs to embody the school’s point of differentiation.

Meanwhile, the newly-formed Moscow School of Management in Skolkovo offers an MBA that focuses on coping with corruption, navigating a failing legislative environment, and dealing with powerful bureaucracies.

02 Globally competitive, locally attentive by Matthew Lynch

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The College of the North Atlantic, Doha, Qatar

Macquarie Group’s One Shelley Street, Sydney, Australia

The design needs to communicate what sets the school apart from its regional and global competitors. Basically, a business school’s facility needs to capitalise on the school’s point of difference.

In most cases, this point of difference will already be well known to the school’s faculty, its students and its alumni. But while the school’s competitive advantage might have been carefully crafted, strategically planned and well-explored, this point of difference will not likely be apparent from the environment in which the students learn, the teachers teach and the alumni unite.

Take, for example, the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, which ranks 25th on the Global MBA Rankings 2011 published by The Financial Times (up from 28th in 2010) and eighth on the Best US Business Schools 2010 list published by Bloomberg Businessweek (up from tenth in 2008).

The school’s dean, Rich Lyons, aims to turn what has been typically regarded by industry as a downside – the university’s ‘radical non-conformism’ – into a virtue. Lyons believes that the Haas School of Business is poised to shine in an age where the financial and professional services industries are placing increased emphasis on collaboration, creativity and innovation.

Non-conformism is a form of creativity that has been embraced by the global IT, finance and insurance industries – and now it is a valued attribute among MBA graduates.

Or take, for example, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) which, in 2007, announced Woods Bagot the winner of an international competition to design its Institute for Advanced Study as well as its School of Business and Management (SBM).

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Typically, teaching is done in a lecture theatre, lab work is done in a computer room, and socialisation generally happens outside of the school’s facilities. The school’s competitive advantage is not typically communicated in its property-based strategy – an unfortunate forfeiture of a tool that can be used for significant leverage.

So, even in cases where the school’s point of difference seems minimal or arbitrary, there are examples of business management schools that have successfully turned their cultural downsides into virtues and opportunities.



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HKUST’s SBM, ranked sixth on the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings 2011, is a truly global business school that maintains AACSB and EQUIS accreditations and collaborates with the Stern School of Business at New York University and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

The school seeks to attract foreign students and to produce successful global alumni, while maintaining local relevance in a period of rapidly changing social, economic and political dynamics within Asia.

The school’s globally competitive difference is based largely on its unique positioning at the crossroads of Eastern and Western business environments. It is particularly well positioned to educate foreign students that want to focus strongly on China: it offers unparalleled networking with Chinese business leaders; field trips to Chinese centres of business; and case studies where Chinese examples feature prominently.

Chance encounters between visitors, students and staff are promoted by the myriad spaces and settings created within the masterplan. Within the SBM, open volumes that link floorplates are brought together with circulation paths, creating a continuous landscape that blurs boundaries in an effort to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration.

The arrangement of the wings of the 20,000m² SBM building were derived from the geometry of the existing campus overlaid with the geometry of traditional Chinese timber screens.

The building will be punctuated by a series of visible case study rooms or ‘knowledge lanterns’ that expose and highlight the contemporary learnings of students.

But perhaps most important is the high level of technology that will be integrated into the building, designed to fortify the SBM’s position as the cornerstone of business education wedged between China and the Western world.

As such, the design of the new AUD 150 million facility for the business school – which is currently under construction – needed to communicate this competitive difference.

Woods Bagot began with the close integration of the SBM with the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), another new and iconic building designed by Woods Bagot to attract globally-recognised industry professionals and intellectuals.Together, these two facilities provide a gateway between academia and the professional paradigms. The facilities complement and assist each other in achieving the vision and objectives of each of the schools, as well as meeting the broader objectives of HKUST.

With an empathetic nod to local cultural norms and architectural devices, the new campus that contains these two schools uses an orderly series of courtyard spaces, which generate a lively, activated street system drawing inspiration from the classic hill town.

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– http://www.mydigitalfc.com/news/gateway-riches-324 – http://english.eastday.com/e/110825/u1a6071375.html – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_simulation – http://www.economist.com/whichmba?page=1 – http://mbaoath.org – http://universityfinancelab.com/photo-gallery – http://www.economist.com/node/18802722 – http://english.eastday.com/e/110825/u1a6071375.html

References

– http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/world/europe/27iht-educLede27.html – http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/3817239/article-Russian-MBA-program-tackles-real-world-hassles – http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/stories/2010/03/08/focus1.html – http://www.economist.com/node/16208000 – http://www.coydavidson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/110727_GIST_The_Mobile_Worker4.png – http://www.futureofcities.ox.ac.uk – http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/25a79a4e-a252-11e0-bb06-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a9543bac-edcc-11db-8584-000b5df10621.html#axzz1VtoKsYtQ

– http://www.capitalvue.com/home/CE-news/inset/@10063/post/3158313 – http://www.mbaworld.com/blr-archive/mba-market/6/index.htm – http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-diary-was-it-worth-it – http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/05/higher-education_bubble – http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/05/the_business_school_tuition_bubble.html

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Eversheds LLP, London, UK

Putting business back in the MBAby James Calder03

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“There is considerable opportunity for future business leaders to grasp the power of place, combined with new virtual technologies and behaviours...”

Every educated educator is aware of the two-way dialogue that exists between educational institutions and industry sectors. This dialogue provides a self-perpetuating source of innovation, where educational institutions learn of the most contemporary techniques and trends in professional practice; while industry professionals benefit from the time-intensive research and new knowledge created by universities.

This dialogue is, however, often overlooked when it comes to workplace innovation. Let’s face facts: the university workplace model hasn’t changed for around a millennium. It is outdated, outmoded and under performing.

An institution that takes precedent from the financial and professional service sectors would see a global workplace in the midst of rapid change. Most obviously, workplaces are physically changing as we move from the industrial age to the information age.

Consolidated portfolios are expanding to include ‘touch-down’ spaces closer to where people live. Enclosed offices are giving way to openness and transparency. Assigned desks are being replaced by workpoints that are designed to encourage specific activities such as collaborative group projects, quiet individual tasks, or meetings for both physical and virtual teams.

These changes are being catalysed by two agents: customers and employees. Customer-driven real estate strategies must focus on the business aspirations and needs of clientele; while employee-driven decisions must be based on strategies that improve employee wellbeing, efficiency and creativity.

The most successful companies use property-based solutions that address these two agents together, dovetailing client-based strategies with employee-based strategies instead of providing mutually-exclusive solutions.

Furthermore, much past research and focus has been placed on the individual, whereas creating spaces for people to work collaboratively as teams is now much more important as knowledge becomes more specialised.


03 Putting business back in the MBAby James Calder

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One could argue the only purpose of the workplace is to bring people together, as flexible work practices and technology are allowing people to work individually in a range of workplaces of their choice. The ‘9 to 5’ day is dead.

Using client-and-employee-based decisions, the most contemporary workplace concepts support three emerging workplace trends: parallel tasks and processing; synchronicity between physical and virtual environments; and collaboration.

These trends will continue to strengthen as new technologies are created that provide the necessary vehicle through which client-and-employee-based strategies can be most effectively met.

There is considerable opportunity for future business leaders to grasp the power of place, combined with new virtual technologies and behaviours to drive significant increases in business performance and new organisational models. Organisations such as Google and Macquarie Group understand this and use it to their competitive advantage.

Parallel processing

Originally designed for product development in the form of concurrent engineering, parallel processing is a work methodology based on the parallelisation of tasks. This is unlike the ‘waterfall’ model of sequential processing, where tasks are performed in succession, one after the other.

Instead, parallel processing relies on tasks being performed concurrently, thereby increasing productivity and quality and decreasing speed to market.

A number of the most progressive and successful companies, including NASA and Boeing, now use parallel processes to develop products and to perform services.

These companies use parallel processing to simultaneously integrate the design of products with other tasks that would usually be performed successively. The iterative and integrated procedures undertaken in parallel processing look at all aspects of the project’s lifecycle at the same time. Errors can, thereby, be discovered early in the process and redesigns can be conducted quickly and with minimal cost.

Within the virtual realm, cloud technology is enabling concurrent engineering on a prevalent scale. Work can be conducted on a single project in real time from any location around the globe.

In the physical workplace, parallel processing is enabled by working environments designed for specific functions. Instead of an employee taking ownership of a single desk and a computer, employees are offered the mobility and freedom to select a workspace that is most appropriate for their current workload.

For example, Macquarie Group Sydney employees based at the recently implemented groundscraper building with interiors designed by Woods Bagot and Clive Wilkinson Architects may choose from a laboratory environment, a library, a cafe, a meeting room and many other work settings that the employee deems will provide the most appropriate environment in which they can conduct their current task.

The most forward-looking business management education institutions will look to harness and progress this trend toward simultaneous task processing. Such institutions can also look toward NASA’s Integrated Design Centre or the Concurrent Design Facility at the European Space Agency for guidance on how best to enable parallel processing that has been specifically implemented within an educational environment.

These environments contain an array of design workstations (each of which are dedicated to a specific technical discipline), advanced technologies (including a multimedia wall with free-hand drawing capabilities) and sophisticated video conferencing facilities.

Parallel processing can also be integrated into the broad structure of business schools to enable a whole-of-life approach that ties recruitment to curriculum, which in turn can be tied to alumni, research and faculty. Instead of business schools undertaking a yearly process of refining their processes, their people and their curriculum, a concurrent approach can enable an iterative design process that is always dynamic, contemporary and relevant.

The current opportunity for business is to break down conventional silos and refocus on new customer segments. Parallel processing is timely for many organisational restructures.


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Synchronicity

The boundary between the physical and virtual worlds within professional environments are being abstracted and blurred. In time, this boundary will cease to become a boundary at all – it will cease to act as an inhibitor between crossing these mediums. Technologies are being developed that allow for the seamless integration between virtual and physical realms.

This means that teams will no longer need to arrive 10 minutes early to set up for a video conference, wait 20 minutes for a file transfer from an offshore office, or have data-streamed voice calls drop out mid-conversation. Just as computer technology once became the most capable enabler of efficiency and productivity, so will IT-based integration solutions become the most capable enabler of collaboration, creativity and connectivity.

As such, the selection of teams will become less dependent on their physical location and increasingly based on their qualifications for a particular project. The result is an increased focus on customer needs – teams will be able to deliver increasingly effective results with greater efficiency.

Collaboration

The industries in which business school alumni will eventually operate have, since the beginning of this century, been intently focused on increasing operational efficiencies, enhancing organisational competitiveness and maximising operating profits through various mechanisms and techniques.

Over the past decade, collaboration has been the most favoured technique because of its ability to increase performance: organisations have realised that team-based performance is superior to the sum of individual performance.

However, within the past five years, collaboration has also become globally recognised as the most powerful mechanism to foster innovation and simulate creativity within the workplace. The current iteration of collaborative work processes is sharply focused on a cross-departmental approach, where teams are being formed from several siloed business units. This supports innovation, fosters creativity and is responsible for outside-the-square solutions.

Perhaps this horizontal integration was most profoundly explained by renowned academic Professor Peter Medaware over 30 years ago. Professor Medaware spoke of creating new knowledge through the seemingly banal task of reorganising his library. When he felt the need to refresh his mind or to break the bind of his present mindset, he would reorganise his library of books, placing previously unrelated books next to each other.

He described this realignment of previously unrelated fields of knowledge as a form of paradigm shift that released the previously unrealised potential of cross-sector knowledge. It was as if the ideas, theories and manifestos of one book would somehow seep through the binding and permeate the conceptual field of the adjacent book, thereby creating an engagement of ideas through theoretical osmosis.

This is the same concept used by business management schools at Yale and Columbia Universities, which aspire to unlock previously unrealised potential by exploring the fertile spaces in between vertical silos.

In 2006, Yale University eliminated its academic silos, opting instead for a curriculum that is industry-driven, not faculty-driven. The curriculum has been restructured from a perspective of accounting, marketing, operations and finance to the perspective of investors, shareholders, employees and customers.


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Columbia University has also cross-pollinated its MBA program with its other schools in an attempt to increase educational value through collaborative learning techniques. Students undertaking an MBA can, for example, study a dual program that is coordinated with the Master of Urban Planning Program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Instead of undertaking an MBA with a speciality in a particular subject area, students gain exposure to the full realm of both schools – their faculties, their alumni, their resources and their students.

Dan LeClair, Vice President at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, agrees that integration, collaboration and cross-silo fertilisation are critical to the success of future business schools. He said that most schools “for the longest time would teach the individual silos and try to pull it all together with a capstone course at the end of the program”.

“What we’ve come to realise is that integration is also a mind-set. You don’t want to reinforce the silo mind-set throughout the program and try to change it at the end.”

This approach extends the ability of the school to produce alumni that are successful in the fields of finance and marketing. Students exposed to this horizontal arrangement of education are better prepared to take on challenging management roles in an increasingly varied field of choice.

Research work that Pfizer is doing measuring actual interaction is telling in our understanding of how collaboration actually works. It shows that, in many ways, the only purpose for the existence of the workplace is to facilitate collaboration.

Education professionals – particularly those responsible for property-based decisions – would be well-advised to look toward the professional sector for inspiration and guidance. They would see a profession that is using innovations in design and planning to catalyse changes, to enable enhanced productivity, to increase knowledge, and to create environments that are simultaneously high performing and highly comfortable.

Image © Pfizer

References

– http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/world/europe/27iht-educLede27.html – http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/3817239/article-Russian-MBA-program-tackles-real-world-hassles – http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/stories/2010/03/08/focus1.html – http://www.economist.com/node/16208000 – http://www.coydavidson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/110727_GIST_The_Mobile_Worker4.png – http://www.futureofcities.ox.ac.uk – http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/25a79a4e-a252-11e0-bb06-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a9543bac-edcc-11db-8584-000b5df10621.html#axzz1VtoKsYtQ – http://www.mydigitalfc.com/news/gateway-riches-324 – http://english.eastday.com/e/110825/u1a6071375.html – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_simulation – http://www.economist.com/whichmba?page=1 – http://mbaoath.org – http://universityfinancelab.com/photo-gallery – http://www.economist.com/node/18802722 – http://english.eastday.com/e/110825/u1a6071375.html – http://www.capitalvue.com/home/CE-news/inset/@10063/post/3158313 – http://www.mbaworld.com/blr-archive/mba-market/6/index.htm – http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-diary-was-it-worth-it – http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/05/higher-education_bubble – http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/05/the_business_school_tuition_bubble.html


WOODSBAGOT.COMUniversity of Western Australia Business School

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Case study: University of Western Australiaby Michael Michelides04

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Michael Michelides, Woods Bagot Principal, is a designer with over 35 years experience specialising in the education sector. In the following case study, he recounts his experiences of how emerging trends in business education were realised in the planning, design and construction of the award-winning business school at the University of Western Australia – ranked fifth on the Australian MBA programs list published by the Australian Financial Review (2009).

The University of Western Australia (UWA) is located – physically and metaphorically – at the centre of Australia’s current resources boom. As one of Australia’s largest industries and its biggest exporter (almost 50 percent of all exports), the mining sector has been directly responsible for a closer conversation between Australia and Asia and particularly China. Australia relies heavily on Asia’s demand for resource exports, while Asia also regards Australia as a critical economic ally and service provider.

As Paul Glasson said in The Australian (June 2011): “Mining, construction, engineering, infrastructure development, wholesale and inter-banking finance, banking sector sustainability, funds management, share market growth, investment banking, accounting and legal services, real estate, and Chinese students studying in Australia, have been nurtured and prospered as a result of the resource relationship between Australia and China.”

As a global hotspot for minerals and energy research, UWA sits right in the middle. Its business school, which enrols around 5300 students annually, maintains critical industry ties with the resources sector and maintains shared offshore teaching facilities in Singapore and Shanghai.

The journey toward a new, energised, creative and holistic business school began in 2005, when Professor Tracey Horton joined the faculty as Dean. He came on board with the aim of leading the business school towards becoming internationally benchmarked with a top 50 global business school ranking.

The official fundraising campaign, Tomorrow Starts Here, was launched in 2006 with an initial pledge of AUD 12 million, significantly contributing to the target of AUD 25 million. Dean Horton’s initiative was the necessary first step in achieving the school’s mission of becoming one of the most influential business education institutions in Asia and Australia.

The campaign was implemented to raise significant funds to transform the business school: “The funds contributed to a new state-of-the-art building that has enabled a new experiential style of learning, co-locating undergraduate, postgraduate and executive training,” said Horton.

Woods Bagot’s design concept for the facility creates an energised central hub of activity, planned spatially around a central three storey atrium space.

04 Case study: University of Western Australiaby Michael Michelides

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The use of this centralised hub recognises contemporary trends and innovations in the workplace sector and is becoming quickly favoured in business education. These foster collaboration through transparency, drive student knowledge through experiential learning and perpetuate innovation through designated meeting space, group work, spontaneous encounters and quiet individual reflection.

Equal focus was spent on the careful design of the academic workplaces. This is increasingly becoming a focus of university communities because of the growing pressure on the need for research. In particular, this has led to a renewed interest in the notion of collegiality and the potential for unstructured intellectual exchange.

“The same theories that apply to the development of ideas amongst students and professionals also apply to university academics.”

At UWA’s business school, the result is a contemporary take on the traditional ‘club’. While the core need for collegiality remains, academics in today’s university environments can do without the typical social and cultural inhibitors associated with traditional clubs – exclusivity, a closed-door policy, isolation and structure.

Instead, the workplace at UWA’s business school fosters unstructured transactional process – the same processes of collaboration, innovation and connectivity that underpin the private sector.

“Closer integration between various parts of our faculty mean that we are now presenting a more coherent view of business education at UWA that will enable us to present a unified face to the business community,” said Professor Horton. “Our new building will provide a major, visible symbol of change and future development.”

Therefore, the same theories that apply to the development of ideas amongst students and professionals also apply to university academics, researchers and teachers. This is particularly applicable in the current academic climate where commercialisation of research, industry partnerships and cash flow through the licensing of intellectual property, industry partnerships and joint ventures have become the common language among university business plans.


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All images of University of Western Australia Business School

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05 Evidence-based planning and design for 21st century business schoolsby Dr Kenn Fisher


Evidence-based planning and design for 21st century business schoolsby Dr Kenn Fisher

Abstract

The 21st century has seen the emergence of wireless broadband and mobile communications devices which are inexorably changing the way people communicate, collaborate, create and transfer knowledge. Yet much of the built learning environment was designed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Today new learning environments are being constructed to meet these emerging technologies and pedagogical practices, although these have not been thoroughly evaluated to see if they actually work and should be replicated.

This article examines the drivers behind 21st century pedagogical practices and the physical learning environments they are carried out in. It covers the competitive pressures impacting on business schools and the needs of employers in appointing graduates with specific competencies.

The paper argues for an evidence-based approach to the design of new learning environments. In this context, whilst there have been a range of new learning spaces designed in the past five years or so, it is only just recently that a more rigorous research approach is being taken to evaluate their performance.

The examination also explores some innovative business school learning environments and argues for a more collaborative and team-based approach to learning to better replicate the approach used by the business community.

Introduction

The evidence-based design approach is a recent and emergent discipline. This was derived largely from the medical model of pharmaceutical trials, which ensure that the evidence emanating from these large trials is sufficient to ensure the safety of the drug under test for use with patients.

Otherwise known as Translational Research – from bench to bed – this evidence-based approach has been adapted to health facility design with rigorous studies measuring the healing rate of patients in different physical environments. These studies follow similar rigour used for drug trials and are resulting in seemingly irrefutable evidence of the impact of the physical environment on human behaviour1.

These methods are now being trialled in non-health environments such as learning environments, with a range of innovative 21st century learning environments now being evaluated.

Results so far are of limited rigour, but do show promise and point to future directions. Some of the key issues to be addressed in improving the approach include:

– Understanding business school tracer studies of students i.e. where do they go when they graduate and what are the graduate competencies being sought by employers and research institutions? – What accreditation criteria are set for business schools to qualify? – Which business schools are competitors and what are they doing? – What are the emerging teaching, learning and research approaches in the 21st century, especially the impact of online and face to face – or blended – learning? – From the above points, what would be the key performance indicators that should be measured in an evidence-based evaluation of learning environments?

This paper addresses these issues and more, profiling what an evidence-based approach to business school planning and design might look like.


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The Business School - Issues for a New Future | Page 41WOODSBAGOT.COM

Future Learning Space, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

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Needs of a 21st century business school

Accreditation by AACSB2, CEMS3 and EQUIS4 is critical to the legitimacy of a business school in the competitive marketplace. CEMS is a global alliance of business schools, whilst criteria for AACSB is largely concerned with six mission statement elements being aligned with school’s processes and practices. An EQUIS accreditation criterion covers:

– Physical facilities and the learning environment – Financial resources – Financial management systems – Information and documentation facilities – Computing facilities – Marketing and public relations – Administrative services and staff.

The key features in the physical environment are illustrated in the extracts following:

No feature of the degree programs of a school is more influential in determining the educational practices of the school than the characteristics of the student population.

What happens in classrooms, online, in group projects, and in individual study is all influenced by students’ backgrounds in educational experiences, cultural history, work experiences, family relationships, and other characteristics. (AACSB, 2011, p26)

The school’s infrastructure fits its activities, e.g., campus-based learning, distance learning, research, and executive education. Classrooms, offices, laboratories, communications and computer equipment, and other basic facilities are adequate for high quality operations.

Technology support for students and faculty is appropriate to programs (e.g., online learning, classroom simulations), and to intellectual contributions expectations (e.g., databases, data analysis programs). (AACSB, 2011, p28).

The physical facilities should provide an adequate learning environment for the students and participants in the school’s various programs. The EQUIS assessment of adequacy will take into account the fact that the requirements for undergraduate students are very different from those for an MBA cohort or for executive education participants. The basic principle is that the physical facilities in terms of auditoriums, classrooms, breakout rooms, social space, etc. should be sufficient to support the particular pedagogical approach in each program. It is usually the case that MBA programs and executive education activities will require dedicated facilities. How is the potential contribution of facilities to the personal experience and development of students evaluated? (EQUIS, 2011, p 56, 57).

The evaluation noted immediately above is covered in the final section of this paper.

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Building P, Professional Development Unit, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

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Graduate Competencies and Employer Requirements

Many universities are articulating graduate competencies which represent the generic characteristics they wish their graduate students to express, such as the University of Sydney as illustrated.

Some universities are now describing these at the discipline or faculty level. For example, business school students would have specific graduate competencies that potential employers or other related target groups, such as research institutes and universities, could expect from new appointments.

What is not yet emerging is a learning environment typology that matches these graduate competencies, although this is required in the accreditation criteria noted above.

Competitive advantage: Local, national, regional and global - and business school rankings

Increasingly business schools are competing for students, locally, nationally, regionally and globally. At a regional level, for example, Australia is competing with similar schools in South East Asia and China such as:

– Lee Kong Chian Business School – Singapore Management University, Singapore – HKUST Business School, Hong Kong – NUS School of Business, Singapore.

These particular schools also compete at a global level as illustrated in the summary of Financial Times Business School Rankings 2009-20105. It should be noted that there is a dearth of Australian business schools in this list.

These Asian business schools, however, provide a wealth of targets as exemplars to inform a business school evidence-based design and planning practice.

21st century teaching, learning and research trends: Blended learning and the face-to-face experience

The recent advent of wireless broadband internet access and mobile communication devices has provided learning models - simultaneously online and face-to-face. This has seriously called into question the industrial age traditional ‘egg crate classroom’ model of teaching and learning. It has also enabled the emergence of a true synchronous/asynchronous and virtual/physical matrix of learning opportunities for which our existing built learning environment infrastructure is not well suited6.

In response to these developments, many innovative learning environments are being trialled. These include an increasing focus on the “third space” which supports social forms of student interaction. The important issue here, especially in universities, is that students can now learn off-campus on line so universities need to identify what spatial characteristics are needed to support a face-to-face experience.

Source: University of Sydney

Summary of Financial Times Business School Rankings (2009-2010)

European Executive Education - Customised

Executive Education – Open Global Rankings

HEC ParisLondon Business SchoolINSEADIMD (Switzerland)IE Business School (Spain)IESE (Spain)Rotterdam SoM (Erasmus)EM Lyon (France)Esade (Spain)Vierick Leuven Gent MS (Belgium)Essec (France/Singapore)

Duke Corporate EducationHEC ParisEsade BSHarvard BSIMDCentre for Creative Leadership (US/Belgium/Singapore)Cranfield SMFundacio Dom CabralINSEAD

University of Darden (USA)Iese Business School (Spain)IMD (Switzerland)Harvard BSThunderbird School of Global Management (US)London Business SchoolCentre for Creative LeadershipMIT Sloan SoMFundacio Dom CabralUniversity of Western Ontario:Ivey (China/Canada)Essec Business School (Fr/Sing)Stanford GSBNorthwestern University: KelloggHEC ParisIE Business SchoolOxford: SaidINSEADColumbiaUofPenn: WhartonUofChicago: Booth

London Business SchoolUni Penn: WhartonHarvard BSStanford GSBINSEADColumbia BSIE BS (Spain)MIT Sloan SoMUniv Chicago: BoothHong Kong UST BSIESE (Spain)Indian School of BusinessNew York Univ: SternDartmouth College: TuskIMDYale SoMUniv Oxford: SaidHEC ParisEsade (Spain)Duke: Fuqua

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synchronous asynchronous

local

remote

face-to-face meeting places

site specific signage

exhibitionsinstallationswhiteboard

telephonevideo conference text messages

shared cyber links

internetweb

virtual studio ‘Google it’

Figure 1. Blended learning matrix combining face-to-face physical and online learning - Virtual and physical online learning, time dependent and time independent. Source: Mitchell, 2005.

This is forcing us to rethink the nature of the 21st century campus, and more specifically what physical attributes need to be provided to actually meet face-to-face with their colleagues, rather than interacting through the now prevalent social networking tools. Interestingly, many of these spatial developments are being instigated through initiatives led by information technology and communications departments and the wholesale uptake of mobile technologies by the current generation of students7.

Collaborative and team-based learning

Collaborative learning is becoming increasingly relevant due to the impact of wireless broadband technologies and the wholesale uptake of mobile technologies by the current generation of students. This approach suggests a more active learning model, rather than the largely passive 20th century model of lectures supported by tutorials. Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) environments support a collaborative approach to teaching and learning.

Collaborative learning means students are engaged in the completion of a common task. Students are not only in groups, they work together in groups, playing a significant role in each other’s learning. The collaborative learning process creates a shared understanding of a topic and/or process among a group that members of the group could not achieve alone. Students may work face to face and either in or out of the classroom, or they may use information technology to enable electronic discussion or collaborative writing tasks8.

It focuses on the learning aspect of working together whereas group ‘teaching’ focuses on what the lecturer does, rather than on the way students can take responsibility for their own learning in collaboration with others.

Collaborative Learning is the umbrella term encompassing many forms of collaborative learning from small group projects to the more specific form of group work called Cooperative Learning. Collaborative learning activities can provide students with the opportunity to think for themselves, compare their thinking with others, conduct small research projects, investigate subject matter with fellow students and to practice using higher level cognitive thinking skills. It can provide activities that encourage students to confront the logic of their own thinking, their own beliefs, and the accuracy of their understanding of previous learning9.

They focus on the social and interactive/active nature of learning including the development of learning, work and life skills. Cooperative learning tends to be teacher facilitated whilst collaborative learning can be in informal spaces often focusing on a group project. Furthermore it can occur online, in a laboratory, in the field or in a classroom. These approaches have the following characteristics:

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Figure: TEAL at MIT11

The problem to be solved is an example of the types of problems found in the community, in industry or in commerce; the solution to the problem requires the use of knowledge, skills and attributes that are part of the curriculum; the problem can be solved by a small team of students, none of whom possesses the knowledge or skills to solve the problem alone, yet each of whom is able to contribute to the final product10.

Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL)

These spaces were developed around 2003 in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to enhance the teaching of physics. They later spread to Australia and are now becoming very popular in The University of Queensland and The University of Melbourne, particularly for their engineering and architectural schools.

Essentially, they combined the use of information technology with face-to-face collaborative and cooperative learning.

The business community

Advisory boards of business schools are increasingly seeking experience enhancement in teaching programs to develop the above-mentioned graduate competencies. This has some impact on the normal teaching program, such as:

– Time tabling flexibility – to allow students to undertake their studies on a part time basis – Work integrated learning – work placements, projects and internships into the curriculum structure which can be assessed – Commercial engagement – increased engagement with industry figures, including the use of adjunct lecturers for specialised subject material.

The overall approach is to strengthen the authentic nature of the curriculum and the way it is delivered, as well as gain a more collaborative approach to ‘town and gown’. Other innovations may include research projects taken by Masters students in collaboration with industry and industry-supported linkage research projects through the Australian Research Council Grants program.

21st century evidence-based planning and design: Performance measures

The emerging TEAL models, which proliferated since MIT first launched the concept in the late 1990s and early 2000s, are in the early stages of evaluation.

Some publicly available articles11 on evaluation show that these spaces work well. Although it is difficult to argue that the physical learning environment by itself can enhance teaching and learning, what is clear, however, is that the physical learning environment can inhibit the practice of some forms of effective pedagogy and therefore limit the extent to which graduate competencies can be developed in students.

Specifically, is the TEAL approach more effective in creating life-long learners compared to the 19th century traditional classroom model? Some studies suggest there are significant improvements to learning outcomes in adopting this approach.


Westfield Group, Sydney, Australia

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Source: TOM, The Space is the Message, 2008.

Overall, in some studies, these Active Learning Classrooms yielded very positive responses from instructors and students. For example a TEAL space evaluated at The University of Minnesota revealed that the instructors who were interviewed enjoyed teaching in the rooms so much that their only concern was a fear of not being able to continue to teach in these new learning spaces.

Similarly, more than 85 percent of students recommended the Active Learning Classrooms for other classes. Instructors and students overwhelmingly found that this space made a difference for them: “I love this space! It makes me feel appreciated as a student, and I feel intellectually invigorated when I work and learn in it”12.

In another study, the studio space was also seen as a significant investment and so must clearly improve learning outcomes: engagement, attitude and collaboration in addition to absorption of the curriculum. Measures of those outcomes were seen as necessarily qualitative. But, based on comments from students and faculty who actually learned and taught in the space, the evaluation team would cautiously say that the studio has met those goals. They also acknowledge that they will need to continue to evaluate progress in outcomes as people gain experience with using the space13.

At The University of South Australia in the Experience 1 Engineering Collaborative, the following areas were evaluated14:

– The aesthetics of the space and what messages students were receiving, (e.g. did they feel safe, positive, student satisfaction). – The function of the Experience 1 Studio to determine how the students were using the space and if the infrastructure (e.g. computers, appliances) was supporting them in their learning and socialising. – The flexibility of the space and, indirectly, the impact on the student experience and learning outcomes.

A number of research tools were used in the evaluation process:

– A survey of all first-year engineering students was conducted two months after students were first allowed access to the space in 2009. This survey reviewed many aspects of first-year experience and had several items that specifically drew information about the Experience 1 Studio. A similar anonymous survey was repeated towards the end of 2009.

– Student focus groups were organised to more deeply explore the issues raised in the surveys and to allow investigation into other issues. – A study on how the walls within the Experience 1 Studio were adjusted to create different spaces was conducted over one week. – Students were asked to map their typical travels within the first year experience space. – To facilitate metacognitive talk (discussion of thoughts and thinking) a selection of visual methods were used in a photoelucidation activity. Random focus group participants were provided with disposable cameras and asked to capture what the first year engineering space means to them. These images were then used to facilitate discussion about meaning in subsequent focus groups. – A comparison of Grade outcomes was made for the four first semester courses before and after student access to the Experience 1 Studio.

Studio space layout example

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Studio

Core first year courses Experiential curriculum

Community Study support

Similar timetables for study and relaxing

Projects requiring teams

First Year directorPeer mentors

OnlineEmbedded

Shared experiences

Collaborative learning

Help desksMovablefurnitureTechnology

Social clubsMentoring

Social Academic

The findings were quite detailed but, in summary, the key outcomes were:

– A positive influence on student learning that in some cases has translated to better learning and social outcomes. – Student retention will also improve, although hard to measure accurately, as there are many other factors that impact upon retention. – Student creation of a new club (Amalgamated Engineering Recreational Organisation - AERO), that spans the civil, mechanical and electrical engineering students (previously each program had their own club). – Students enjoyed interacting with their peers in other engineering programs as part of the common first year and the space. They were keen to continue these connections as they move into the specialised years of their program.

Clearly evaluation of the TEAL approach involves both quantitative and qualitative examination. It is also evident that qualitative studies show significant support for the TEAL model from both teachers and students. Further quantitative study is required to support these qualitative findings and this work is currently underway at The University of Melbourne’s Learning Environments Action Research Network Centre. Findings will be made available as they become public.15

In this context the Harvard Case Study method has been carried out in spaces as illustrated for some decades. Whilst these case study rooms foster eye-to-eye contact between participants, they do not really allow for significant collaboration in small syndicate teams other than for, say, two or three minute exercises between two or three students. There are around 90 of these case study rooms in the Singapore Management University. It is surprising that the TEAL model has not yet been adopted there.

Teaching, Learning and Research in business schools - exemplars

Modern business school facilities often include various forms of applied learning spaces in which business students can receive ‘hands-on’ experience with career-related activities in a risk-free environment. Examples of a variety of applied learning spaces are provided below.

Behavioral Research Laboratories

The China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) www.ceibs.eduHosts a behavioural laboratory designed to facilitate, through a boardroom set-up and one-way mirrors, behavioural experiments and scenario simulation.

University of Maryland, Smith School of Business www.rhsmith.umd.edu/behaviourlabThe Netcentric Behavioural Lab complements an adjacent Eye Tracking Lab and Team Processing Lab.

Eye Tracker Labwww.customerexperiencelabs.com/services/eye-tracking“Eye tracking data provides a direct way to measure and visualise your customers’ subconscious response to your web and product design. Eye movements are a measure of visual attention and cognitive processing. In fact, eye muscles are the faster muscles in the body and they often react before we are consciously aware of what has occurred or before we can verbalize it out loud.”

SOURCE: University of South Australia

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Team Processes Lab http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/labs/University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business Behavioural Research Lab

The behavioural lab facilities at the McCombs School are extensive and well equipped with the technological enhancements necessary for the conduct of research. The capabilities are extensive and designed to facilitate the research faculty members and PhD students.

There are two major rooms in the Behavioural Research Laboratory: a large room with tables and associated viewing area with video equipment and a workstation room. There is also a third room (Small Focus Room) that can be used for smaller experiments, conferences, or as a control area for administering experiments taking place in the other rooms.

Financial markets labs and simulated trading floors

Trading floors and financial labs are among the most common forms of specialised instructional spaces. These spaces are designed to allow business students to hone their stock-market trading skills and apply learned theory in a risk-free setting.

American University in Cairo (AUC) Citadel Capital Financial Services Centre http://datacenter.aucegypt.edu/smc/Representing AUC’s strong focus on linking theory and practice, the centre is equipped with technological capabilities equal to any business school trading floor in the world.

China Europe International Business School

University of Maryland, Smith School

Eye Tracker Lab

Team Processes Lab

Netcentric Financial Markets Data Center

Netcentric Financial Markets Teaching Theatre

University of Maryland Smith School of Business, Netcentric Financial Markets Data Centre / Netcentric Financial Markets Teaching Theatre and Data Centre / Netcentric Financial Markets Teaching Theatrehttp://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/financelab/The second of three components of the Smith School’s Netcentricity Laboratories, the Financial Markets Lab comprises a teaching theatre for classes and a data centre for student and faculty research and practice.

University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, The John R. & Georgene M. Tozzi Electronic Business and Finance Centre - Ross Trading Centre http://www.bus.umich.edu/The hands-on experience provided by the Tozzi Centre includes a student-managed fund for which the centre’s technology provides both raw data-gathering and financial analysis capabilities.


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University of Reading, Henley Business School, International Capital Market Association (ICMA) Centre - Dealing Rooms http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/about_us/dealing_room_facilitiesHenley’s ICMA Centre contains state-of-the-art facilities, which allow students to gain experience managing stock portfolios using live pricing data.

Drexel University, Lebow College of Business http://avsg.hifihousegroup.com/projects.php/education/The school is home to six moot boardrooms with ceiling-level projectors for monitoring and remote operation.

Rutgers University, Rutgers Business School Food Innovation Centre Business Incubator http://www.foodinnovation.rutgers.edu/incubatoroverview.htmlThis incubator for food-based businesses is a 23,000 sq ft facility that houses “shared-use food processing space for a broad array of products and processes, marketing capabilities and technical laboratories, distance learning and educational programming, and administrative space for staff as well as clients.”

Michigan State University, Eli Broad College of Business, IBM On-Demand Supply Chain Centre http://broad.msu.edu/supplychain/lab The IBM Supply Chain Management lab not only allows Broad College graduate students and faculty to test theory using live supply chain data, it is also linked to an interconnected grid of partner business schools which also have a strong focus on supply chain management, including Smeal College of Business at Penn State University, the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Smurfit School of Business at University College Dublin and the National University of Singapore.

University of Michigan, Ross School of Business

Drexel University, Lebow College of Business

University of Reading, Henley Business School Rutgers University Institute of Food & Nutritions

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Conclusions

Dodgson (see appendix) notes that 'few Australian business schools are known for their research intensity or relevance for industry'. He suggests that the 'new model business school' which has emerged from the global financial crisis is attuned to a more relevant research and industry-linked strategy and role.

He holds up the Imperial College Business School in London as a global exemplar, citing its high ranking, its cross-disciplinary activities and its innovative approaches to research and industry collaboration. The school has a global reach with international partners and focuses on entrepreneurship. It features a compulsory MBA unit covering innovation, entrepreneurship and design, alongside other Masters courses in digital and sustainable business.

It is exemplars such as this that can inform an evidence-based approach to the design of business schools.

Linking this evidence with relevant theory, such as Gibbons (1994) and Brinkerhoff (2001)16, can provide a robust platform on which to plan, design and operationalise a socially engaged 21st century business school.

Appendix

Research in business schools – case study

An enterprising concern by Mark Dodgson (The Australian, August 25, 2010)

Few Australian business schools are known for their research intensity or relevance for industry.

Universities rarely promote business schools as research leaders or bridges with business, government and the community. The global financial crisis provided an opportunity for significant soul-searching on the part of business schools across the world.

Questions were asked about the relevance of their research and the utility of producing graduates who knew nothing about how organisations work and the value they created, let alone the ethical consequences of their actions. The new model business school is perhaps best represented by the Imperial College Business School in London17.

During the past few years it has emerged from a mundane management school to a rapidly growing, vibrant organisation that competes with the best in the world. It is jointly ranked first in Britain for the quality of its research and attracts the most funding per head of any business school in Europe. The school holds important lessons for business schools that wish to improve their research and relevance.

First, it actively engages with researchers in engineering, science and medicine to address big questions that confront business and society, such as sustainability and public health. It partners in large-scale research programs in urban energy systems and healthcare management.

There are joint staff appointments in business and engineering, and the medical school funds an academic position in the business school. Such arrangements allow the business school to contribute to important research problems. They also highlight the relevance of business research to the broader university community.


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University of Adelaide First Year Learning Centre, Adelaide, South Australia

Second, a model of partnership encourages leading businesses to fund and support research and teaching. The school has strategic European and US corporate partners with which it works in research, education and training, recruitment and consulting, and develops deep relationships of enduring value. The school also manages a high-level international network of leading innovative firms, sponsored by Microsoft.

The school has created a hub to develop entrepreneurial skills and is a partner in Design London, a joint venture that uses an innovative laboratory to promote the merger of design, engineering and business skills. Its educational offerings are equally innovative. Uniquely among MBA degrees in the world, Imperial College has a compulsory integrating course on innovation, entrepreneurship and design. New postgraduate courses include Masters degrees in digital and sustainable business.

The school also hosts the Rajiv Gandhi Centre studying innovation and entrepreneurship in India. Social entrepreneurship is a feature, and staff members work on issues related to health in the developing world and developing eco-cities in China.

There are clear lessons for business schools in Australia. Relevance is enhanced by research excellence. But that research has to be meaningful for business and society.

Mark Dodgson is director of the Technology and Innovation Management Centre at the University of Queensland business school.

Third, the school has developed its core expertise in innovation and entrepreneurship. The groups in this area have grown from seven in 2003 to 70 today. Its research ranges from the role of design in services innovation to the management of billion-dollar infrastructure projects to how consumers often fail to use sustainable technologies in the ways their producers plan.

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References

1. The Role of the Physical Environment in the Hospital of the 21st Century: A Once in-a-Lifetime Opportunity, Abstracts Table Supplement (100 pages, 250 Abstracts). Eds Roger Ulrich*, Xiaobo Quan, Centre for Health Systems and Design, College of Architecture, Texas A&M University; Craig Zimring*, Anjali Joseph, Ruchi Choudhary, College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology. Abstract supplement to a report to The Center for Health DesignSM for the Designing the 21st Century Hospital Project. This project is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Center for Health DesignSM, May 2005

2. http://www.aacsb.edu/accreditation/standards.asp

3. http://www.cems.org/about

4. http://www.efmd.org/index.php/accreditation-main/equis/equis-guides

5. Financial Times (Jaio/Tong) Business School Rankings 2009-2010

6. Mitchell, W. (2003), “21st Century Learning Environments”, presentation at a workshop on new learning environments at Queensland University of Technology in conjunction with K. Fisher.

7. See a) Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) on behalf of JISC (2006), “Designing Spaces for Effective Learning”, www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISClearningspaces.pdf; b) Education.au Limited (2009), “21st Century Leaning Spaces”, www.educationau.edu.au/learning-spaces; c) Scottish Funding Council (2006), “Spaces for learning: a review of learning spaces in further and higher education”, www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/Resources/external.../sfc-spaces-for-learning and Bill Mitchell, 2005.

8. The University of Adelaide Leap into Collaborative Learning: Home page http://www.adelaide.edu.au/clpd/resources/leap/leapinto CollaborativeLearning.pdf

9. Nagata, K. and Ronkowski, S. (1998). Collaborative Learning: Differences Between Collaborative and Cooperative Learning, The Office of Instructional Consultation, University of California Santa Barbara. http://www.oic.id.ucsb.edu/Resources/Collab-L/Differences.html

10. Miller, A. H., Imrie, B. W. and Cox, K. (1998). Student assessment in higher education: a handbook for assessing performance. London: Kogan Page.

11. http://web.mit.edu/8.02t/www/802TEAL3D/teal_tour.htm

12. Alexander, D. et al (2009), “Active Learning Classrooms Pilot Evaluation: Fall 2007 Findings and Recommendations”, The University of Minnesota. www.classroom.umn.edu/projects/ALC_Report_Final.pdf.

13. Tom, J., K. Voss and C. Scheetz (2008), “The Space is the Message: First Assessment of a Learning Studio”

14. Anon, First year engineering learning space – enhancing the student experience. Unpublished, Undated. Source, University of South Australia.

15. The Learning Environments Action Research Network is associated with the Smart Green Schools project; see www.abp.unimelb.edu.au/research/funded/smart-green-schools.

16. Gibbons. M., Limoges. C., Nowotny. H., Schwartzman. S., Scott. P. & Trow. M. (1994) The new production of knowledge – the dynamics of science & research in contemporary societies. SAGE Publications Ltd, London UK.

Brinkerhoff, R. (2001) High Impact Learning. Perseus. Cambridge, MASS

17. Author’s Note – currently globally ranked no 37 http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/imperial-college-london-tanaka


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A marketplace for ideasby Georgia Singleton06



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A marketplace for ideasby Georgia Singleton

“The right spaces can make your hair stand on end with excitement or even seemingly slow down time... Space is part of the real time experience of learning and working.”

The ‘creative curator’

Can we really understand what the business school of the future looks like, not only physically but how it functions?

Business schools may seem to look and act like any other institutional facility, but should they? Rather than building on past achievements, we should start with a model shift that looks to the future. This may sound daunting, but what if it’s a simple idea that can be achieved both economically and efficiently to produce a ‘super generation’ of global business leaders?

We need to take a flying leap; the world is moving fast and the next generation of business leaders requires a dramatically different physical world to enable and unlock their potential - that is the aim of the game. Physical and virtual space is a significant part of creating a platform for the future.

It is a fact that people respond to physical and virtual environments. The right space can make your hair stand on end with excitement or even seem to slow down time. I have worked in some beautiful, inspirational spaces that have facilitated great design creativity which is invigorating and has a profound effect.

So, why continue teaching in spaces that are uninspiring, didactic, inefficient and depressing? Space is part of the real time experience of learning and working and can help facilitate new ways to learn and work. The trick to discovery seems to be never to ask what something looks like but to find a projection portal. This is not something from Dr Who; it’s simply a methodology that can help project our thinking ‘outside the box’ (or the lecture theatre or the office cell).

The ‘portal’

Instead of a vision, I suggest we start with a methodology centred on the student and then link that to behaviour or activities and then, in turn, to spatial implication. We are going to explore:

– What are the desired traits of the next generation business leader? – How do they work, learn and do stuff? What are their activities and behaviours? – What can this mean spatially? What is the architecture?

If we can successfully link these traits to spatial outcomes, then these are the design portals for the future business school.

So, what are the desired traits of the next generation global business leader? Peter Lee (Vice Chancellor of Southern Cross University) spelt out what he thinks tomorrow’s graduate looks like in a lecture at a recent Tertiary Education Management Conference held on the Gold Coast.1 He referenced Steven Rosenbaum’s book, Curation Nation2, as key to understanding the future of business and our information-laden world. I highly recommend this publication to anyone trying to understand the impact of the web and its ‘generation of curators’.

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In the future, there will be high demand for staff whose job it is not to create more content but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. “Curation is the next ‘billion dollar’ opportunity … a curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds VALUE to that molecule”2, wrote Rosenbaum. The bottom line is we need a generation of curators to make the leap into the future.

I believe this applies to ways in which the next generation can start to think, or rather re-think. It is more attuned to the way our designers work and ‘idea make’, gathering large amounts of information and curating it to create a value proposition or a big idea based around design intelligence. This may be a key to unlocking the portal for the next generation of leaders, influencing the environments in which they work, socialise and learn.

The next ‘Generation C’ leaders are about Content, Creativity, Connectivity and Curation. I agree with Peter Lee’s “tomorrow’s graduates”, who are:

– Big picture people – Passionately curious – Team smart – Resilient – Simple mind set – Clear and agile communicators – Fearless.

Let’s group these traits and understand what they mean in terms of a shift in attributes and activities. This will enable us to understand what the key pedagogical and cultural shifts need to be. Only then can we ask the question: what does this mean spatially?Big picture people

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Big picture peopleCharacteristic shift: These students/business leaders are not afraid to think big, filtering the detail and creating a solution. Their sub-attributes are:

– Flexibility: agility in thoughts and methodology. – Future focus: always looking ahead. – Positive outlook: make anything happen. – Openness: time to think. – Breadth: weave across many subjects.

Pedagogical/cultural shift: – The teacher’s role is a creative source, inspirational, and facilitator of new ideas. Maybe there are no lectures, just curation of information. Facilitation around seeking others opinions. – Students will continually be encouraged to ask questions and challenge assumptions about how the world works. No lectures. – The orchestrator needs to allow time to ponder. – Identify the forces driving performance and think about how to improve performance. – Watch others. – Reassess what businesses are and what they value. – Stay up to date on developments occurring in your unit, in other groups in the company, and in your industry overall. – Ongoing learning by reading books, magazines, and industry reports; attending seminars; talking with experts.

The student is a curator of ideas, an orchestrator and a designer of ideas.

Spatial shift: Spatially this is both virtual and physical. What if a business school looks more like a design studio, with places to curate and also to ponder, absorb and reflect? Space to support asking questions and collaboration means few or no lecture theatres or didactic mode spaces.

What if it looked like a marketplace for ideas? Would there be more visual accessibility into discussions and events? Should there be areas in which to be playful? Why aren’t there pin-up spaces expressing big ideas or big screens for blogs, media and sketching? Perhaps this looks like a Google or Apple workplace? Creative spaces, inspirational, fun/playful, social, with a view.

Passionately curious

Characteristic shift: “I have no special talent, I am only passionately curious.” Albert Einstein3. Wanting to find an answer, find a way, find a needle in a haystack, they can orchestrate an outcome.

Pedagogical/cultural shift: Teachers become directors, mentors, orchestrators. The class is a studio, the outcome is unknown.

Spatial shift: Space that enables diversity: IT enabled, agile space, 24/7, food and drink, mixing, transactional space, club spaces, identity to space, the home, create a bedroom and an office.

Team smart

Characteristic shift: Natural collaborators work as a team and can manage people.

Pedagogical/cultural shift: Teachers are facilitators.

Spatial shift: No lecture theatres.

ResilientCharacteristic shift: Failure is natural and an acceptable part of the process.

Pedagogical/cultural shift: Accepting mistakes and failure as a positive part of the process.

Spatial shift:Creative spaces , spaces that resemble good urban social spaces.

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Simple mind set

Characteristic shift: Able to gather a huge amount of information and curate it into simple and powerful ideas that others can grasp. Form a team around ideas that are collectively owned.

Pedagogical/cultural shift: More collaborative and expressive teaching and working environment.

Spatial shift: A curatorial environment. Can ideas be displayed in a digital environment? Learning from each other, learning wall, discussion portals, social spaces, on display.

Clear and agile communicators

Characteristic shift: Able to discuss anything of relevance. To filter information and communicate in a new agile way crossing disciplines and weaving cross-disciplinary ideas.

Pedagogical/cultural shift: Teachers are discussion facilitators from social to intellectual discourse; boundaries are blurred.

Spatial shift: Enabling technology in classrooms for different modes of discussion. All teaching spaces are collaborative and promote discussion.The boundaries are blurred between teaching and learning and social spaces. Networked spaces, visually and virtually contiguous. Beehive, ant farm, socially connected work and learning environments.

Fearless

Characteristic shift: I can do/change anything attitude.

Pedagogical/cultural shift: Teachers enable and orchestrate free form thinking and celebrate the new ideas.

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WOODSBAGOT.COMBuilding 5 Block A&B, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia

Spatial shift: Our students are fast, smart and fun, so why can’t the space reflect the personality of the student? Agile spaces can be easily manoeuvred, ownership can be taken by anyone, including industry and community.

There are some big shifts here, especially in the role of the teacher as a curator, facilitator and communicator. The student is the centre of the environment and is agile.

Strategic university vision

However, it’s not only about the student experience in the classroom. How do we also align to the strategic vision of the campus? What do the academic and research spaces look like? How do we integrate community and industry to generate a new typology of the campus?

Again, it’s about methodology. The question is not, ‘what does the campus look like’, but, ‘what are the shifts in the strategic direction of the campus?’ What, then, does this mean culturally? Then we can see (the portal) - what it means spatially - masterplan, architectural and interior.

For example, if we distil Vice-Chancellor Dr Michael Spence’s white paper (The University of Sydney 2011–2015), most of the strategy can be sorted into strategic headings.4 These can then be translated to cultural shifts spatially and through architectural and virtual manoeuvres. This methodology forms a matrix of spatial shifts that can be applied to any masterplan, architecture or interiordesign project. The five key themes are:

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Community

Create an environment where community can be part of the learning experience.

Industry

An environment where industry can meet and collaborate with students and academics to teach and be taught.

Teaching and Learning

A new space for the creative curator.

Research and workplace

A workplace that enables collaboration, creativity and collegiality ordered around private, invited and public hubs.

Sustainability and the environment

What if this act of design made the world a better place?


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IT’S A BLUR: Students from all seven schools converge at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design for what founder David Kelley calls “radical collaborations”.

This all amounts to a matrix of design principles that will help us direct and design a business school from a tangible value proposition. Maybe the proposition is that the new business school is both physically and virtually:

– Non institutional but with identity – Porous and connected – With inside and outside gathering spaces – Socially networked – A terrain, contiguous, continuous and immersive – A diverse playing field of spaces to learn and work. – A home – Global and networked – A marketplace for ideas – More like a design studio.

What if it looked, felt and acted more like the new d.schoo l at Stanford University (formerly the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design).

In his recent paper ‘Sparks Fly’5, Mike Antonucci asks: “Can imagination be taught?” The answer to this rhetorical question is “Evidently, because the d.school’s innovation hothouse is changing the way people think”. It employs a cross-disciplinary curriculum to help unlock creativity and design intelligence led thinking. Following are some insightful extracts into the space.

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“Multidisciplinary pools of teachers then immerse them in a system of innovative thinking, with specific goals for solving practical problems. Bundled into project teams that blur all the traditional academic lines, the students who converge here focus first on reinventing themselves, then maybe the world.”

Gupta says the d.school gave him an appreciation “for small things that you do that make a huge difference in the end.” But even more fundamentally, he found a specific new confidence—a comfort level when speaking publicly to large audiences—that has been valuable in all his interactions.

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Kelley has seen many similar transformations, some emotionally intense. “We have these people who just start crying [when describing] how ‘I used to be the kind of person who didn’t have that much fun’ or ‘I used to be the kind of person who was purely analytical.’

“They’ve flipped,” Kelley says, “to some place [where] they just feel different about themselves.”

These anecdotes are evidence that the right design outcome can create an environment that supports excitement in learning and creative thinking. To help make the shift in the design of new learning environments, it is important to suspend belief in the process and not ask what the space will look like but use the tools outlined in the first part of this paper to create a process for a new design outcome.

A great example of this kind of process, back in the day, was achieved during the design of the Stealth Bomber. The Stealth Bomber looked like no other aircraft had ever looked (in fact it looked more like a bat), but the designers never asked themselves what the craft was going to look like; the design came out of a rigorous process around a shift in function from flight as the main objective to the objective of stealth. There were no precedents at the time and so the design process had to be robust enough for the stakeholders to accept a new outcome.

The fact is, if you ask a different question based around evidence, and apply a rigorous design process, you are likely to achieve an extraordinary outcome.

References

1. TEMC Conference 2011, Gold Coast. Paper by Peter Lee.2. Rosenbaum, Steven; ‘Curation Nation.’3. www.brainyquote.com4. Spence, Michael; ‘University of Sydney 2011-2012 White Paper’. http://sydney.edu.au/strategy/white_paper/5. Antonucci, Mike; ‘Sparks Fly’, Stanford Alumni Magazine, March/April 2011.



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The Agile Business School:What does it look like?by Jo Dane, Sarah Ball, Georgia Singleton

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The Agile Business School:What does it look like?by Jo Dane, Sarah Ball, Georgia Singleton

“MBA recruits are fully immersed in the business environment, bringing their entrepreneurial ambitions, curiosities and leadership aspirations to the business school.”

The next generation of business schools will reflect a convergence of links between pedagogy, industry, community and the workplace. These elements will emulate brand and culture for the next generation of business leaders, demanding a synergy with 21st century thinking, technologies and processes. What are the characteristics of the next generation of business leader? How do business schools attract them? And how do they learn? The answers require a distinctive spatial response for the contemporary business school, a spatial response that will inspire curiosity, collaboration and leadership.

The next generation of business leaders

Business leaders are expected to be good communicators, be ideas-driven and be able to think laterally. They are creative, curious and innovative; they are risk takers and do not fear failure. They facilitate, orchestrate and harness the power of teams. How will these traits evolve in the future? While these expectations will continue they will be amplified through social media, technology and global connectivity. The next generation of business leaders will be curators of information, strategy and people: communication will be more important than ever.

The next generation of business students

What does the next generation business student look like? Building on Singleton’s four super traits of the ‘agile student’, the next generation business student will demand choices, customisation, collaboration and learning to be fun and fast (Singleton, 2010):

– Choices may present in the form of specialisation of the curriculum, learning modes, study groups, assignment content, presentation format and learning environments. – Students like to customise everything from their mobile phone sleeve and Twitter page, to subject choices, class schedules and how they receive university communications. – Collaboration is natural for the 21st century student; they collaborate prolifically online which makes collaborating face-to-face a natural extension of learning. Learning is a more connected and engaging experience through collaboration with peers.

Students are increasingly blurring the boundaries of learning and fun; it is possible to socialise, have fun and learn at the same time. Having fun is part of relationship building with peers and teachers, developing a learning culture that simultaneously binds values and ideas. And with the immediacy of knowledge availability, students don’t want to visit the library to borrow a book if they can download the information via the internet.

Speed of communication is everything. Delays in access, slow internet speed and system crashes contribute to high levels of anxiety for the 21st century student who expects information to be available in real time.

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Profile AUG Business Student

Profile BPG Business Student

Profile CMBA

Profile DPhD Student

Profile EBusiness Academic

4+ hours/day on campus

– Agile

– Expect choices

– Customise everything

– Collaborators

– Connected

– Mobile

– Hybrid learning environment

On campus after hours

– Curious

– Ambitious

– Collaborative

– Multidisciplinary

– Connected

– Engaged

– Work & study simultaneously

Immersed on campus

– Ambitious

– Entrepreneurial

– Problem-solver

– Collaborative

– Fearless

– Good communicator

– Executive

– Life-long learner

8 hours/day on campus

– Research-focused

– Campus-based

– Collaborative

– Engaged with industry & community

– Engaged with teaching

– Connected to PG community

Diverse campus hours

– Engaged w/ industry, community and teaching

– Facilitators/conductors

– Collegiate

– Research-focused

– Networked

– Connected

Figure 1: Business school profiles

Since communication is everything, students live in a hybrid world of online connectivity, face-to-face collaboration and content engagement. They are technologically intelligent, experiencing technology and the internet as an extension of themselves (Prensky, 2001, 2009).

The attributes of business school academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students differ from each other in many ways. While undergraduates are still developing a sense of their place in the world, MBA recruits are fully immersed in the business environment, bringing their entrepreneurial ambitions, curiosities and leadership aspirations to the business school.

PhDs are research-focused, but nonetheless engaged with industry initiatives and processes. The business academic acts as a facilitator, orchestrating authentic learning encounters, embedded in business case studies that require ethical and socially responsible solutions. They retain close connectivity with business and community colleagues who actively participate in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Refer Figure 1.

How does this align with business school mission statements? The mission statements of a number of prominent business schools support these profiles.

Common themes among business school mission statements include developing students as:

– A new generation of leaders – Engaged with government, industry and community – Encouraging curiosity – Challenging norms and taking risks – Good communicators – Responsible citizens – Able to use information effectively.

Each business school tailors its curriculum and learning objectives to align with its mission statement, which is then reflected in the culture of its students and staff, as well as in the physical environment. Together these elements combine to establish the brand of a business school.

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“The environment silently communicates to prospective course applicants the type of business leaders developing within.”

The business school brand

What does the physical environment say about the business school? It is a direct reflection of its mission, values and objectives. The environment silently communicates to prospective course applicants the type of business leaders developing within. It speaks to the leadership of attributes that will be developed: fearless, entrepreneurial, technologically intelligent and good communication skills. Spatial volumes, terrains, materiality and the people-dynamic (visible engagement of the student community), all combine to signal the business school brand.

Business schools place high importance upon rankings; the higher the global ranking, the higher the quality of business school applicant. Reputations are built on numbers of MBAs and links to industry. Various MBA ranking systems evaluate different elements, with high importance placed on employment success, alumni salaries and career progress.

The Princeton Review (2011) incorporates ratings on the academic experience and physical campus experience. The Wall Street Journal (2011) seeks business feedback, evaluating business schools based on the attributes of their graduate employees. Beyond Grey Pinstripes (The Aspen Institute Centre for Business Education, 2011) measures course content and faculty research, with a particular emphasis on social, ethical and environmental topics.


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Perhaps the most prestigious ranking system is the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking which, in addition to employment success and salaries, also measures “the extent to which alumni fulfilled their goals or reasons for doing an MBA” (The Financial Times, 2010). The characteristics of MBA recruits will have direct implications on future rankings, as will the physical campus experience and environment. The next question to consider is how best to teach the next generation of students to be the next generation of business leaders?

Pedagogy

The dramatic decline in student attendance at lectures, especially in light of the online availability of podcasting, indicates that students do not see the value of attending lectures when they can get the equivalent experience online.

When provided with choice, students opt for the solution that best suits their lifestyle. Even when students do attend lectures, it is common to see students passing the time on their mobile devices rather than listening attentively to the lecture.

The student perspective of lectures was pertinently captured in a research project undertaken by Mark Wesch at Kansas State University and articulated in a video titled ‘A View of Students Today’ (Wesch, 2007). It is evident that the experience of lectures and lecturing needs to change according to the characteristics of the next generation of students, harnessing the power of technologies that invite interaction and knowledge sharing.

The future of lectures as a mode of teaching may be desirable from the university’s perspective, but unless universities deliver a more engaging format, student attendance will continue to decline.

Collaborative project work is a critical component of both the undergraduate and postgraduate business student experience. The case study method of learning is commonly associated with business school pedagogy. It simultaneously connects students with industry and community, providing real life issues to explore.

This learning experience sees the academic as a facilitator, inviting interaction from students, discreetly directing discussion and instilling a process of dissecting business cases. Students continue this methodology into assignment work and collaborative projects.

Future trends in teaching and learning indicate that student collaboration will continue to thrive and grow, supported by increasingly complex educational technologies and use of social media. The format of lectures will transform to enable greater interactivity between students, similar to the Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) model as expressed in the SCALE-UP project (2011).

This is a current issue being actively debated within universities, complicated by the realisation that the majority of lecture theatres are too inflexible to do little else other than transmit information. Activities associated with the reconceptualisation of lecturing need to be aligned with the physical environment, demanding an overhaul of the design of lecture theatres.

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“Diverse environments, from cafes to collaborative learning spaces, to media hubs and private nooks, all contribute to the idea of a campus village.”

Communities and villages

While pedagogical change is sweeping universities, favouring student-centred learning, the question to be asked is how will the learning needs of the next generation student be met by the physical learning environment on campus? Large cohorts of undergraduate students may appear overwhelming initially, but the creation of learning communities within the cohort makes relationship building more manageable and inviting.

Learning communities may develop out of case study groups or subject interests, but will be nurtured through connections with places on campus, as well as connectivity online. Diverse environments, from cafes and collaborative learning spaces, to media hubs and private nooks, all contribute to the idea of a campus village. In the same way that a village is simultaneously fragmented (through separate facilities and services) and united (through a sense of community and public spaces), the business school ‘village’ can be designed to similarly fragment and unite.

By creating a varying terrain of spaces, from large to small, noisy to quiet, public to private, collaborative to individual, the village concept has the capacity to instill a strong campus-based learning experience.


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Figure 2: old paradigm work practice Source: Woods Bagot (2010)

Figure 3: new paradigm work practice Source: Woods Bagot (2010)

Workplace

The creation of communities on campus in many ways emulates the business workplace. A workplace will typically be organised into zones whereby people work in teams to achieve objectives; they are collocated to enhance communication and collaboration. Each internal cluster of a workplace is in itself a community.

The workplace is increasingly being designed as a series of terrains, presenting alternative work environments according to the activities to be undertaken and with whom. The notion of activity-based working (Calder, 2010) has direct correlation with activity-based learning.

Students on campus select the environments to inhabit based upon the activities they will engage with. Within the last decade conceptual and physical transformation of the workplace has commenced in response to evidence-based research that has led to a better understanding of work processes enhanced by technologies (Worthington, 2005; Groves & Knight, 2010).

Where the convention has been for people to manage their work activities from their workstations and offices, the new way of working is for activities to be centred on people who are mobilised to a variety of settings depending on the work activity, refer Figures 2 and 3 (Calder, 2010).

What this means for the workplace is the creation of a variety of terrains to enable people to undertake activities purposefully, and for people to move around the workplace according to the activities to be accomplished and to interact with specific people.

Macquarie Group embarked upon an ambitious transformation of their Shelley Street Sydney workplace to reflect their organisation as agile, entrepreneurial, dynamic, focused, team-based and non-hierarchical. The results have been nothing short of stunning; the variety of terrains have been readily embraced (Calder, 2010).

The campus learning environmentThe Macquarie Group experience, coupled with emerging research into the activity based working revolution, is synonymous with future directions in learning on university campuses. Learning is moving away from being centred on the teacher to being centred on the student. More emphasis is placed upon students developing generic skills such as working in teams, project management and problem solving, in order that they are adequately prepared to hit the ground running in the workplace. And the campus environment is reflecting this.

Terrains of learning represent places for students to study in a variety of modes, from formal to informal, social to reflective, collaborative to individual, noisy to quiet and light to dark. They provide places for students to engage with their peers, coursework, teachers and industry contacts, just as the workplace provides places for workers to engage with colleagues, supervisors, work material, relevant consultants and industry partners. An agile campus that makes provision for these terrains will be meeting the needs of the 21st century agile student and the next generation of business leaders.

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This image and bottom left: One Shelley Street, Sydney, Macquarie Group. Woods Bagot in collaboration with Clive Wilkinson Architects and Macquarie Group

– The Financial Times. (2010). Global MBA Rankings 2011. Retrieved 13/09/2011, from http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-rankings-2011

– The Princeton Review. (2011). Business School Rankings. Retrieved 13/09/2011, from http://www.princetonreview.com/business-school-rankings.aspx

– The Wall Street Journal. (2011). Business Schools. Retrieved 13/09/2011, from http://online.wsj.com/public/page/business-schools.html

– Wesch, M. (Producer). (2007) A View of Students Today. retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

– Prensky, M. (2009). H. Sapiens digital: From digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom, Innovate 5(3). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=705

– SCALE-UP (2011), North Carolina State University, http://scaleup.ncsu.edu/

– Dewees, S. (1999), The School-within-a-School Model, Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC

– Worthington, J. (2005), Reinventing the Workplace, 2nd Ed, Architectural Press

– Groves, K. & Knight, W. (2010), I Wish I Worked There!: A Look Inside the Most Creative Spaces in Business, Wiley.

References

– Singleton, G. (2010) The Agile Student. Woods Bagot Blue Paper

– Calder, J. (2010) Presentation of Macquarie Group

– Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Native, Digital Immigrants. On The Horizon,

9 (5, October 2001). – The Aspen Institute Centre for

Business Education. (2011). Beyond Grey Pinstripes. Retrieved 13th September 2011, from http://www.beyondgreypinstripes.org/index.cfm


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Superheroes of the university and workplace of the futureby Mark Kelly

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Superheroes of the university and workplace of the futureby Mark Kelly

Who will be the superheroes of the workplace of the future, what skills will they have and what technology will they use to communicate and deliver? How will this workforce of superheroes be trained and what emphasis will be placed on learning and research in their collective development?

How will we consider present day scenarios and evaluate an exponentially different and better future?

Basic bricks and mortar are predictable to an extent, but how will we understand the changes in the world of commerce and communications that will mean a new generation of smart collaborators leading from within a complex organic ecosystem?

How will we define and manage the university or the workplace of the future? We are able to recognise major changes in the hierarchy of the workplace as we move from the typical pyramidal structures of the past, so dependent on the authority of the ‘boss’, to a more organic structure based on networks of collaborators. In tandem with these social changes, we see a next generation expectation of higher levels of health and wellbeing in parallel with a heightened sense of responsibility to do the right thing in terms of energy and resource use, for example, the increase in desire to reach a zero carbon objective.

The world of architecture and design thinking is no longer bound by the demands of local relationships and clients. Increasingly they are seeking out globally benchmarked design solutions that not only satisfy local objectives, but place the building on the map to create additional interest from a ravenous intellectual user group that understands what is happening in every major city of the world. In fact ‘major status’ is often defined by the number of international trophies a city has in its architectural CV.

Scientific research is opening doors to new applications that will further transform the way we work and collaborate. Meanwhile, the more we learn about ourselves and the way we work, the better we’ll be at developing technologies that serve our changing needs in these places of tomorrow.

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Image: Microsoft Productivity Future Vision video

While the future of work is unlikely to be driven by any specific technologies, it will certainly be enabled by a confluence of many. And as usual, the largest impact will occur at the hotspots where multiple trends intersect. Researchers and thought leaders at the Institute of the Future1

have devised the following technology augmented work practices:

“From Just-in-Time to Proactive Contextual Computing: We will all move from time-consuming foreground computing to ambient, proactive, and contextual computing. This means that our smart, wearable systems will negotiate with embedded sensor networks and pervasive information to process patterns of our activities, patterns of places where we work, and perform tasks on our behalf.”

We will develop a true ‘sixth sense’ supported by the potential of suitable technology that will interpret, evaluate and support us to do what we do better and smarter.

“From Sparsely Sourced Analysis to Deeply Informed Decisions: Our most important decision-making and planning practices will change substantially. Using more powerful combined-knowledge processing applications for data mining, semantic analysis, numeric analysis, pattern processing, visualisation, and simulation, we are moving from making decisions based on shallow analysis and thin resource processing to deeply informed decisions and plans.

From Formal to Emergent and Cooperative Organisational Structures: New cooperation technologies, including social software such as Facebook and Twitter and the increase of the use of smartphones, will enable us to move from working in small co-located and formally aligned clusters of enterprise workgroups to larger, loosely coupled, ad hoc networks of mobile colleagues. In this new structure, we will work virtually in distributed teams cooperating on specific tasks and projects together in real time. Upon task completion, these teams will dissolve and reform in new arrangements based on the next task.

From Desk-Bound to Ubiquitous Displays: We are growing closer to a world where interaction with displays will be seamless and ubiquitous. As we move through our workspaces, our mobile personal information artefacts will be capable of seamlessly projecting a personal, common digital workspace on nearby ambient displays, on desktops, in meeting rooms and public spaces, on wearable displays, and on dashboard screens.

From Real World to Virtual World Interaction: Through a combination of pervasive connectivity, abundant computational resources, and new graphic- and media-rich telecommunications, we will be able to stay in continuous contact with colleagues and share work tasks seamlessly in both virtual and physical spaces, regardless of location. As we see the emergence of new real worlds that combine the fluid social interactivity of applications like Second Life with the spatial integrity and veracity of Google Earth, we’ll be able to meet, share data, and work together with new graphical visualizations and simulations.”

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We will not only know where we are in real time, but will be able to share abundant and rich data with many collaborators at the same time to establish the best decisions from multiple sources.

If we observe the common household of today with TV, laptop and mobile devices all synchronised and working in tandem, it requires a new capability to interact with multiple sources of data and to relish this heightened level of connectivity. A single focus on one subject will no longer be sufficient and we will need to train a more capable younger generation that will readily adopt the new devices and unlock the true potential of the information and knowledge on offer.

There are seven key technology clusters that will enable these shifts as outlined in the Institute of the Future’s Technology Foundations research2:

1. Proactive computing2. Amplified collaboration tools and

processes3. Sense making and visualisation

tools4. Device webs and sensor webs5. Ubiquitous displays6. Abundant computation and

abundant connectivity7. Common 3D graphical interfaces.

From 1970s Star Trek to more recent examples in Minority Report, Avatar and all the superhero genres, it is clear that we will see the emergence of a different, more technology-tuned cohort of leaders. Our universities and business schools will need to respond and adapt as these new skills develop.

A different type of skill and focus will emerge that will require a variety of work styles and the business of the future will need to work harder to attract and retain the best talent in a more fluid and organic workplace. All work will be within a living, breathing ecosystem across nonexistent global geographic and language boundaries.

Workers, researchers and students will emerge with a new spectrum of technology-enabled skills such as those noted by the Institute of the Future2:

“Ping Quotient: Excellent responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network.

Longbroading: Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles.

Open Authorship: Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors.

Cooperation Radar: The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who will make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission.

Multi-Capitalism: Fluency in working and trading simultaneously with different hybrid capitals, e.g. natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual.

Mobbability: The ability to do real-time work in very large groups; a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously; extreme-scale collaboration.

Protovation: Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles; the ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure.

Influency: Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique).

Signal/Noise Management: Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice.

Emergensight: The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation and collaboration on extreme scales.”

Conclusion

The future is going to be brighter and better than the smokestack dependent past, where manufacturing created wealth and defined the future of nations. Objects of desire and need will be manufactured wherever costs are lowest and will increasingly be managed by sophisticated industrial robots.

The true leaders and superheroes of the workplace of the future will be the conceptualisers and innovators. They will be able to use every device and system at their fingertips, collaborating across boundaries to explore, evaluate and define solutions to the relevant problems and opportunities of the time.

This is the technology which will shape their learning and development and ultimately their impact on global commerce.

References

1. Institute of the Future: The Future of Work - Technology Foundations: http://www.iftf.org/node/754

2. Institute of the Future: The Future of Work - Perspectives: http://www.iftf.org/node/2774

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09 University Grads Don’t Make the Gradeby Jeffrey Holmes with Global Strategy Group

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Woods Bagot recently commissioned Global Strategy Group, a prominent research firm, to conduct an online survey of 500 elite business decision-makers across North America.

Business elites are defined as decision-makers who:

– Hold the title of Principal, CEO, CFO, COO, Managing Director, or Vice President (79%) or are senior level employees who rank in the top 25% of company hierarchy (21%); – Work at companies with 100 or more employees (one-quarter (24%) work at companies with more than 10,000 employees); – Work at companies where at least 25% of the workforce is comprised of salaried employees; – Have decision-making authority when it comes to things like company strategy, personnel oversight; – Earn upwards of $100,000 annually; and – Are at least 35 years of age.

Business elites were asked to evaluate the quality of both their workforce and workspace.

Elites were probed specifically about employees hired out of college or graduate school with no prior work experience, referred to throughout this report as recent college graduates.

OverviewBusiness decision makers are not impressed with today’s college graduates.

– Students are only somewhat or not at all prepared for success in the business world. – Few graduates who apply for work have the skills needed to succeed in an entry-level position.

09 University Grads Don’t Make the Gradeby Jeffrey Holmes with Global Strategy Group

– Even fewer possess the skills they need to advance or be promoted.Recent graduates fall short of expectations on highly-valued attributes like problem-solving, collaboration and written communications skills, while

exceeding expectations on little- valued social media and technology skills. – While technological savvy may be important to business leaders of the future, it ranks at the bottom of executives’ list of desired skills for today’s graduates to possess. – Leaders place much greater emphasis on the aforementioned attributes, but recent graduates are falling short of expectations in these critical areas.

Executives blame institutions of higher education in part for failing to adequately prepare graduates for success in the business world.

– Executives believe that the business world has changed far more in the past 15 years than institutions of higher learning. – And, they believe that education has not kept pace with the changing needs of businesses.

Business leaders believe that the spaces in which students learn impact their future success.

– Executives advocate for more intimate education spaces, like small meeting rooms, which accommodate small groups and large, open tables or work stations, as compared to lecture halls and tradition classrooms.

The next generation of business leaders will face a world that is the most complex, dynamic and fast-moving in history. How do we prepare students to meet these 21st century demands? The answer lies not just in new approaches to teaching and embracing technology. Our challenge requires a complementary spacial response - education environments that inspire collaboration, drive curiosity and foster leadership.


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Business decision-makers are not impressed with today’s graduates and their preparedness to succeed in the business world. C-Suite (highest level of executives) are even more critical of graduates.

4%

66%

30%

2%

58%

40%

Very Somewhat Not PreparedPrepared Prepared

Very Prepared Not PreparedPrepared

All Respondents C-Suite

Most business leaders say that fewer than half of graduates have the skills they need to succeed in an entry-level position.

– 60 percent of all respondents say that less than half of graduates have the skills they need to succeed. – 70 percent of C-suite executives say that less than half of graduates have the skills they need to succeed. – About one-third of respondents and C-suite executives say that only a quarter of graduates have the skills they need to

succeed.

Here’s what we asked:“What percent of graduates applying to work with your company possess the

skills they need to succeed in an entry-level position with you?”

Here’s what we asked:“How prepared are college graduates for success in the business world – very

prepared, somewhat prepared, not very prepared, not prepared at all?”

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“Kids have a fair amount of subject knowledge and very little understanding of how to actually work within a business or how to apply their knowledge in an entry level setting.”

- Survey Respondent

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Business leaders believe that even fewer graduates applying to their companies have the skills they need to advance or be promoted.

– 43 percent of respondents say that less than a 1/4 of grads have the skills they need to advance.

– 47 percent of C-suite respondents say that less than 1/4 of grads have the skills they need to advance.

Here’s what we asked:“What percent of graduates applying to work with your company possess the

skills they need to advance or be promoted at your company?”

Executives tend to believe today’s graduates are less prepared for success in the business world than their counterparts 15 years ago.

Here’s what we asked:“Are today’s graduates more or less prepared for success in the business world

than graduates fifteen years ago?”

Today’s Graduates More Prepared

41% Today’s Graduates

Less Prepared49%

About half of business leaders tend to think graduates of fifteen years ago were more prepared than graduates of today regardless of age, and even younger business leaders favour graduates of fifteen years ago:

– 41 percent graduates today more prepared, 48 percent less prepared among 35 to 44 year-olds; – 41 percent more, 48 percent less among 45 to 54 year-olds; and – 40 percent more, 51 percent less among leaders ages 55 and older.

Same10%

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Here’s what we asked:“Beyond the technical requirements of your industry, what are the three most

important skills or attributes new hires need in order to succeed at your organisation?

Problem-solving, collaboration and critical-thinking skills are the most sought after attributes for graduates of today and tomorrow to possess. Social media and technology skills fall to the bottom. Only 5 percent of executives put technological/social media skills in the top three.

Skills or Attributes Today Top 3

Problem-Solving Skills 49

Collaboration / Ability to work as a team 43

Critical Thinking 36

Written Communication Skills 31

Open and Responsive to Change 22

Leadership Skills 18

Ability to Focus 16

Independent Thinking 13

Responsive to Feedback 13

Ability to Innovate 12

Social Skills 12

Presentation Skills 10

Creativity 10

Understanding of Global Business Issues 8

Technological / Social Media Skills 5

“One of the main issues with new college graduates is that they don’t have a great work ethic. They can expect upward mobility only by showing consistent, strong effort.”

- Survey Respondent


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Even 15 years from now, executives say problem-solving, collaboration and critical thinking will be essential. Social media/technology becomes more important, but falls well below other attributes.

Skills or Attributes 15 Years Later

Problem-Solving Skills 41

Critical Thinking 38

Collaboration / Ability to work as a team 32

Open and Responsive to Change 27

Leadership Skills 25

Understanding of Global Business Issues 24

Ability to Innovate 23

Technological / Social Media Skills 18

Written Communication Skills 16

Independent Thinking 12

Creativity 12

Ability to Focus 11

Social Skills 8

Responsive to Feedback 6

Presentation Skills 6

Here’s what we asked:“What do you think will be the three most important skills or attributes new hires

need in order to succeed fifteen years from now?”

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Graduates are exceeding expectations in areas of lesser importance to leaders (technological skills) and falling short in areas deemed key to their success.

Below is a list of skills and attributes some people say are important to success in the business world. Using a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 meaning they are exceeding expectations and 1 meaning they are falling far short of expectations, executives rate recent college graduates on each of the following:

Skills or Attributes Mean % Rating 1-5

Technological/Social Media Skills 7.7 12

Creativity 5.9 39

Open and Responsive to Change 5.9 43

Collaboration / Ability to work as a team 5.7 44

Social Skills 5.7 46

Presentation Skills 5.5 49

Ability to Innovate 5.4 52

Independent Thinking 5.4 52

Problem-Solving Skills 5.2 55

Critical Thinking 5.0 62

Responsive to Feedback 4.9 60

Ability to Focus 4.9 63

Leadership Skills 4.8 68

Understanding of Global Business Issues 4.6 69

Written Communication Skills 4.5 67

Grads only “make the grade” in one skill

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“Colleges need to emphasise both written and communications skills. Younger people are so dependent on shortcuts through texting and other social media that they avoid proper grammar and interpersonal verbal skills that are necessary in the ‘working world’.”

- Survey Respondent

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Business leaders are split on whether educational institutions are to blame for unprepared graduates. However, among those who say students are not prepared, the majority blame educators.

3%

48%45%

4% 1%

40%

57%

2%0%

15%

72%

13%

Excellent Good Only Fair Poor Excellent Good Only Fair Poor Excellent Good Only Fair Poor

All Respondents C-Suite Not prepared

Business leaders overwhelmingly believe that business has changed more than higher education over the past 15 years.

Here’s what we asked:“Which has changed more in the past fifteen years - higher education or

business?”

Business77%

Higher Ed

15%

Here’s what we asked:“How good of a job are today’s colleges and universities doing preparing

graduates for success in your industry?”

Same8%

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“Students need to think on their feet. It’s not all found in a book. They need creativity.”

– Survey Respondent

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Business leaders believe that institutions of higher education have failed to keep pace with the changing needs of business.

Here’s what we asked:“Do you agree or disagree? Institutions of higher education have kept pace with

the changing needs of business in order to prepare students for success in the business world.”

Have kept pace44%

Have not kept pace56%

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“Students today are well educated, but seem overly tied to technology. They can make computers and software dance, but struggle to interpret the results.”

- Survey Respondent

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Here’s what we asked:“How important is the physical space where students learn for preparing them for success in the business world?”

Executives say learning spaces are tantamount to success.

77%

23%

72%

28%

Important Not Important Important Not Important

All Respondents C-Suite


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Most executives were educated in traditional classrooms and lecture halls...

Traditional Classroom

Small to Mid-Size Lecture Halls

Large Lecture Halls

Small Meeting Rooms Centred around large table or workspace

Labs with individual work station

Online / eLearning

48%

29%

10%

9%

3%

1%

Here’s what we asked:“Thinking about your undergraduate and graduate education, what type of educational

space did you primarily learn in?”

...but they believe small meeting rooms with communal work spaces are ideal learning environments.

Traditional Classroom

Online / eLearning

Labs with individual work station

Small Meeting Rooms Centred around large table or workspace

Large Lecture Halls

Informal or Social Spaces

Other

63%

Here’s what we asked:“Which of the following types of education is best suited to preparing students for

success in business?” (Choose top 2 - results are greater than 100% due to two options being selected).

20%

20%

11%

6%

6%

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“Use more real-world situations, increase problem-solving techniques, increase creativity and innovation in thinking, increase working in groups and team environments.”

- Survey Respondent

WOODSBAGOT.COMFuture Learning Space, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

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So, how can we prepare the business leaders of the future to be more collaborative and creative? What drives critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration?

Space Matters.

While learning philosophies are changing, the educational needs of the next generation must also be supported by the physical learning environment on campus. Yes, space matters.

Classrooms haven’t changed in 100 years. The classroom remains teacher-centred, inflexibly collaborative and filled with expensive technology that is not integrated for optimal support of learning.

What should the future learning environment look like?

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Technology EnabledTechnology has transformed the ways students access information.

Teachers must no longer spend most of their time transmitting information.

They can instead nurture and facilitate the transformation of information into knowledge.

The future of education is flexible furniture, integrated technologies, dynamic screens that move and pivot and adapt. Integrated into the environment are surfaces for writing, projecting and pinning-up, the acoustics are adapted for group and individual work, there’s an absence of spatial hierarchy and an ability for students to rapidly reconfigure space.

1. 2.

3. 4.

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CollaborativeIf the information which used to be transferred to the student in a classroom can now be accessed anytime and anywhere, then the primary role of a learning environment is to facilitate a social exchange among learners and between learners and teachers.

Spaces are promoting student collaborations, problem-solving, experimentation with an idea, discussions, debate among themselves and other peers beyond the classroom. The space encourages negotiating and presenting their findings; they are constantly engaged with web-based technologies and conducting impromptu briefings with teachers.

5. 6.

7. 8.


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FlexibleFlexibility emerges as the most important characteristic of a collaborative learning environment.

There is flexibility in facilitating a variety of modes of social exchange, flexibility in responding to the particular needs of the participants, and the potential for quick and spontaneous reconfiguration of these relationships.

FunOne of the most significant barriers to a student developing a culture of lifelong learning is boredom. As designers, we take very seriously the need to create enjoyment in learning through stimulation, discovery, recognition, and, yes, fun.

The future is active-learning environments that are customisable, experiential, experimental. Creative places of high quality that give a sense of ownership and identity.

9. 10.

11. 12.

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New pedagogies +New technologies +New learning spaces

= Improved critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration

The spacial response for the future is education environments that inspire collaboration, drive curiosity and foster leadership. This will enable business schools to prepare students to meet the needs and challenges of 21st century business.

Picture References1, 5, 6, 8, and 12: University of Melbourne, The School of Engineering Student Learning Centre, Melbourne, Australia.2: University of South Australia Future Learning Spaces, Adelaide, Australia.3: University of Technology Sydney Faculty of IT, Sydney, Australia.4. Cornell University Visioning Design Study, New York, USA.7: Building 5 Block A&B, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia.

9. University of Adelaide, First Year Learning Centre, Adelaide, Australia.10: University of Western Australia Business School, Australia.11. University of Technology Sydney, Building 5 Block A&B, Sydney, Australia.13. University of Adelaide 1st Year Learning Centre, Adelaide, Australia.


Mark KellyDirector - Education, Science & Health

Jo DaneEducation Consultant

Dr. Kenn FisherEducation Specialist

Sarah BallPrincipal

Georgia SingletonPrincipal

Michael MichelidesPrincipal

James CalderDirector of Research

Matthew LynchSenior Consultant - Research

Contributors

WOODSBAGOT.COM The Business School - Issues for a New Future | Page 106

Jeffrey HolmesPrincipal

Global Strategy Group is a public affairs and public opinion research firm serving a variety of clients worldwide. We have conducted thousands of market research projects since our inception, including focus groups and surveys in nearly every state in the country and in many places around the world for political, corporate, government, non-profit, and association clients. Global Strategy Group has a long history of conducting objective, non-partisan research on issues impacting businesses and higher education.

Copyright © Woods Bagot Pty LtdABN 41 007 762 174

All Rights Reserved. No material may be reproduced without prior permission. While we have tried to ensure the accuracy of the information in this publication, the Publisher accepts no responsibility or liability for any errors, omissions or resultant consequences including any loss or damage arising from resilience in information in this publication. Any opinions in this publication are solely those of the named author of the article in which they appear. Unless named as author, the Publisher, Editorial team or other contributors and Woods Bagot do not endorse any such views and disclaim all liability arising from their publication.

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