Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

The EFMD Business Magazine | Iss.02 Vol.15 | www.efmdglobal.org

Special supplement

Business Schools + Ecosystems =?

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.02 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

The business school’s journey from unbundling to networks to ecosystems Contents 6 Ecosystem Edge: What can business schools learn from businesses Arnoud De Meyer 11 Ecosystem Orchestration: Much more than strategic alliance management Markus Kreutzer and Pia Neudert 16 Managing new business school ecosystems: Some do’s and don’ts Mark Greeven and Dominique Turpin 22 Revisiting a business school’s impact agenda in an ecosystems environment Amanda Gudmundsson and Robina Xaxier 28 Company-led Learning Ecosystems: Reimagining professional development in corporate talent management Denis Konanchuk and Marat Atnashev 34 Rising Model of “3I” Circles: Innovation and entrepreneurship education embedded in business schools of the Shanghai and Hangzhou region Xiaobo WU and Linan Wei 1

40 Edtech as a catalyst for the advancement of ecosystem-based management education Giuseppe “Beppe” Soda and Gabriele Troilo 46 Paradoxical Leadership: Coping with fluidity and complexity of ecosystems Steven Poelmans, Bart Cambré and Wouter Van Bockhaven 51 Managing Quality in Education Ecosystems: The emerging challenges Ulrich Hommel and Sarah Vaughan

Special supplement | Business Schools + Ecosystems = ? | The business school’s journey from unbundling to networks to ecosystems

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A common message is embedded in all of these articles: business schools should get ready and embrace this new concept of ecosystems; it will improve what they are doing right now and help them future-proof their competitive positioning and operations

he traditional “business model” of business schools is being challenged in fundamental ways. This relates to what education is offered and how, what role knowledge generation will play in the future, to what extent business and societal impact will become the other side of the “research coin”, and, finally, what type of faculty and staff will be needed to successfully way-find into the future of the business school. Some may argue that academia – and business schools within it – are under siege. I disagree with this term.

We are rather at the beginning of a new era of higher education that will elevate the ambition of management education to an unforeseen level, in alignment with the technological and socioeconomic disruptions that are reconfiguring the role of business organisations in bringing purpose and value to their stakeholders.

In this context, the emergence of the ecosystem as a novel form of organising and delivering business school activities will play a central role.

This volume contains nine thought-provoking contributions that examine the evolving role of ecosystems from complementary perspectives.

A common message is embedded in all of these articles: business schools should get ready and embrace this new concept; it will improve what they are doing right now and help them futureproof their competitive positioning and operations!

No doubt, much appreciated comfort zones will disappear in the process, and many adjustments will cause pain to entrenched interests, but this will all be to the benefit of business school stakeholders, in particular students (“learners”). This explains why we have chosen learning ecosystems as the main focus of this supplement.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

Ecosystem partners are complementors that adopt a flexible and fluid way of working together, and this helps to make organisational boundaries and functional silos more permeable. Applying this logic to business schools, the authors argue that schools will be less and less able to meet client demands as single players

Business schools are on a journey towards ecosystems that starts with the unbundling of existing activities (e.g., stackable degrees), leads to a stronger reliance on networks for the sharing of value chains (e.g., the emergence of the distributed business school) and adds fluidity as well as a transitory element when moving on to ecosystems (e.g., a shift that is already visible today in entrepreneurial spaces nurtured by business schools). With the conviction that these three steps describe the general trajectory of business school development, the articles in this supplement examine what will change as we are approaching the final destination. Readers will gain a deeper insight into what ecosystems are, why they are relevant for higher education and business schools in particular, and how they can be utilised as an institutional development opportunity that has far more upside than downside potential for established players and newcomers.

Arnoud De Meyer (author of Ecosystem Edge: Sustaining competitiveness in the face of disruption, Stanford Business Books, 2020) opens our inquiry by asking what business schools can learn from businesses. Based on case examples, de Meyer argues that business schools can improve their competitive positioning by refining their service offer and utilising ecosystem capabilities. It will help them to become more business relevant, more impactful, and will help them to evolve into “true” schools “for” business.

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Markus Kreutzer and Pia Neudert follow this up by explaining what kind of paradigm shifts are associated with a move towards ecosystems and why it is a much further-reaching challenge than strategic alliance management. Ecosystem partners are complementors that adopt a flexible and fluid way of working together, and this helps to make organisational boundaries and functional silos more permeable. Applying this logic to business schools, the authors argue that schools will be less and less able to meet client demands as single players. Ecosystems offer all the advantages of a strategic partnership network but are more easy to reconfigure as new opportunities arise.

Mark Greeven and Dominique Turpin take a closer look at the management and leadership dimension of operating within an ecosystem that they define in terms of boundary-less and client-centric organisations that operate much like a biological ecosystem. Using IMD as an example, the authors conjecture that a different way of organising business education will be required. This will involve an experimental mindset, the willingness to delegate responsibility as well as focus on a well-defined value proposition. Embracing an ecosystem approach is, in their view, without alternative; we must adopt and move forward or be left behind.

Impact and relevance have recently received a good deal of airtime in the business school community. Amanda Gudmundsson and Robina

Special supplement | Business Schools + Ecosystems = ? | The business school’s journey from unbundling to networks to ecosystems

Xavier examine how the connectedness with institutions outside of academia and the added value created in the process need to be seen in a different light as business schools are evolving into ecosystem players. These, for instance, include collaboration as a shared cross-institutional phenomenon drawing on a wider population of organisations and a redefinition of roles within the network of partnerships. Citing a number of Australian case examples, the authors argue that ecosystems encourage multi-level, continuous interactions that allow business schools to tackle more complex projects, thereby giving the concept of “impact” greater meaning.

Business schools have much to learn from organisations outside of academia when it comes to transitioning successfully into ecosystem mode.

Denis Konanchuk and Marat Atnashev use the complementarity between business ecosystems used for value creation and supportive learning ecosystems as a starting point of their investigation and then derive five key design principles for the latter. The authors propose a far-reaching, learner-centric design and resourcing of talent management that carries important lessons for business schools, both in terms of schools maintaining their complementarity to the education provision of corporate partners and in terms of profiting from the successful innovations emerging in the corporate sphere.

Xiaobo Wu and Linan Lei explain how the ecosystem embeddedness of business schools / universities can be a source of competitive advantage for a region and the schools within it. They cite the example of innovation and entrepreneurship education in Shanghai and Hangzhou, one region known as the Chinese Silicon Valley and the other a centre of SME companies as well as home of Alibaba and Ant Financial. The respective ecosystems are represented as three-layered environments with an interdisciplinary circle within the university, an interorganisational circle built around the university, including institutions of national relevance, and an international circle that insources talent and resources globally for innovation and start-up formation.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

The arrival of new technologies can speed up the transition to providing education in learning ecosystems. This can simultaneously happen in two directions, demand-pull as well as supply-push

Giuseppe “Beppe” Soda and Gabriele Troilo explore the role of Edtech as a catalyst for the advancement of ecosystem-based management education. With the arrival of COVID-19, Edtech has experienced an enormous innovation boost to facilitate virtual learning and also, increasingly, cross-school virtual collaboration. The authors explain why the arrival of new technologies can speed up the transition to providing education in learning ecosystems. This can simultaneously happen in two directions, demand-pull as well as supply-push.

Steven Poelmans, Bart Cambré and Wouter Van Bockhaven argue that ecosystems provide a mental model well suited for solving wicked problems increasingly common in the business world and in higher education. The authors suggest that a variety of leadership paradoxes can arise such as dealing with the tension between the emergence and intentionality of ecosystems.

They offer a paradoxical leadership framework that describes behavioural alternatives useful in such a complex and fluid environment.

Finally, Ulrich Hommel and Sarah Vaughan explore the emerging challenges for managing quality in an ecosystem setting. They base their 5

analysis on three ecosystem dimensions – knowledge sharing, innovation, and learning – and offer reflections on how quality management (assurance) will be impacted, in terms of strategic positioning and leadership, technology platforms and tools, the redesign of the learning experience, and the advancement of supportive learning analytics. The authors conclude that agile quality managers will excel in this new environment; the shift to ecosystems can be a positive game-changer for their careers.

It is the hope of all contributors that this publication will initiate a much-needed debate on the future role of ecosystems in the business school sector, for learning alongside more or less all other activities and services, and speed up the discovery and sharing of best practices within the management education community.

The readers are invited to engage with us in this discourse.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

By Arnoud De Meyer

Ecosystem Edge: What can business schools learn from businesses?

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ver the last decade, there has been a renewed and growing interest in deploying loosely coupled networks of companies and individuals as an alternative to integrated supply chains or tight alliances. This form of organisation seems particularly well-adapted to situations where companies are confronted with a high degree of uncertainty and the need to innovate. These networks have been described as ecosystems because they are analogous with natural ecosystems or communities of living organisms in conjunction with the non-living components of their environment, interacting as a system.

In 1993, J.H. Moore defined a business ecosystem as a network of organisations and individuals that co-evolve their capabilities and roles and align their investments so as to create additional value and/or improve efficiency. Three elements in his definition are critical. First, there is a conviction that there is an opportunity to create new value for potential customers and that no single company can unlock the value opportunity acting alone. Second, it is about creating networks without too many constraints. And third, the partners in the network may still act independently but they co-align their actions and investments.

Ecosystems have many advantages. They enable faster joint learning as they bring together partners with different capabilities who together can create new ‘ecosystem goods’, or knowledge that is exclusive to the ecosystem but which is shared by most or all partners. It is also a flexible means of organisation as some partners can be left to go, and others may join, thus enabling partners to adjust their activities quickly to changing circumstances. This seems particularly

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appropriate in times of disruption where the environment is changing rapidly, where business models need to be adjusted and scaled up quickly.

Ecosystems are not a totally new form of organisation. The old commons that one finds in any English town, the networks of wool producers in medieval Northern Italy or the management of water in the Javanese rice terraces are historic examples of such ecosystems. But as Gartner, the global ICT consulting firm, argued in 2018, the cutting edge use of technology has moved from having a focus on creating new services and using platforms to deliver them, to a focus on playing a part in the ecosystem, exerting influence but not control.

This renewed interest is made possible through the deployment of technology, but is also about the new opportunities it opens for business. In our book, Ecosystem Edge – Sustaining Competitiveness in the Face of Disruption, Peter Williamson and I described how the rapid development and scaling up of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and its financial subsidiary Ant Financials, the dominant market share of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in cloud services, or the quasi-monopolistic position of Cambridge’s ARM in the design of RISC processors are, to a large extent, the consequence of these companies’ strong commitment to developing as an ecosystem. Other examples include Apple, which created an ecosystem of suppliers and App developers to scale up its entry in the smartphone market, or the Chinese white goods producer Haier, which outplaced many of its middle managers and encouraged them to set up their own small micro-enterprises. The latter transformed itself from a manufacturer into an incubator ecosystem with close to 5000 partners.

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White goods producer Haier, outplaced many of its middle managers and encouraged them to set up their own small micro-enterprisesr transforming itself from a manufacturer into an incubator ecosystem with close to 5000 partners.

Special supplement | Ecosystem Edge: What can business schools learn from businesses? | Arnoud De Meyer

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

It is essential to work hard on building trust and be clear about the governance systems in the ecosystem. In fact, we need to build an agile and resilient network of partners, not a bureaucratic organisation with high transaction costs

Does this have relevance for business schools?

Yes, and this is for three reasons. First, after thirty years when the traditional model of a business school prevailed and boomed, we may be in for some serious disruption. The rapid acceleration of educational technology may disrupt our delivery and business models, the proliferation of specialised master degrees may well undercut the traditional MBA programmes, micro-credentialing may reduce the value of a university degree, and new private competitors may be much more productive in delivering education.

Second, and as I argued already ten years ago, I believe that we need to evolve from being business schools into schools for business. What do I mean by that? Business schools used to limit themselves mainly to teaching traditional business subjects such as finance, marketing, operations, accountancy and strategy. Companies indeed needed graduates with deep knowledge in these disciplines, and they wanted sophisticated updates on these topics for their executives. But more recently, companies have often come with different types of questions to business schools, such as: how will digitalisation change business models and work practices? How do we cope with sustainability and stewardship challenges? How do we promote and manage diversity? And, what is the role of an enterprise in society? To answer such questions we need input from other disciplines such as technology, mathematics, psychology, philosophy, etc. This is different from the classical liberal education where students are taught a broad range of subjects. Business schools need to call on these other disciplines to help them formulate answers to precise questions. Thus, there is a new role for business schools, i.e. as the orchestrator of and 8

the intermediary for the providers of knowledge that comes from a wide variety of sources. This is what I referred to as a ‘school for business’, i.e., an institution that can help companies find solutions for a wide range of challenges.

Third, existing business schools will be confronted with new competition and the pressure on financial models that comes with it. We are already seeing Asian business schools rise fast in the rankings. And business schools in Australia or the United Kingdom, which counted on a steady and large supply of applicants from China, may soon discover that this source of revenue may gradually but surely dry up.

When these three trends accelerate, business schools will be confronted with a much higher level of uncertainty and will have to accelerate their innovation. Like any other organisation, business schools operate in ecosystems.

Leveraging some of these ecosystems may help them in innovating and scaling up more rapidly.

In our aforementioned book, we describe how companies have done this successfully. Below, I will highlight four lessons that can be applied to business schools.

Special supplement | Ecosystem Edge: What can business schools learn from businesses? | Arnoud De Meyer

30yrs

After thirty years when the traditional model of a businessschool prevailed and boomed, we may be in forsome serious disruption

All of us work in ecosystems, but we may not always be conscious of this. Most, if not all business schools, have partnerships with other business schools for research or student exchange.

We work with companies on applied research or executive education. We have contacts with other schools in our universities. But have we carefully thought about how to leverage these contacts to drive innovation in, for example, internationalisation or technology deployment? If we want to activate and take leadership in such an ecosystem, we must first develop a clear roadmap for the ecosystem partners. Once this roadmap exists it will enable partners to align their capability development and investments. We also need to analyse which partners can bring the most relevant capabilities, make it attractive to them to join and ensure that the entry barriers for joining the ecosystem are as low as possible.

Working with partners is not easy: we operate in different cultures, use different jargons, have distinctive organisation structures, etc. It is of utmost importance in an ecosystem to reduce the transaction costs and enhance the efficiency of collaboration. Company practice can inform us that this does not require us to write lengthy and detailed contracts, but that it is about contracts that focus on high level outcome, leave room for flexibility, are perceived to be fair across the ecosystem, and are clear about dispute resolution.

It also requires portals to smooth the path of data exchange between the ecosystem leader, its partners and among its partners, without trying to control all these exchanges. And it is essential to work hard on building trust and be clear about the governance systems in the ecosystem. In fact, we need to build an agile and resilient network of partners, not a bureaucratic organisation with high transaction costs.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

Obviously, partners will sign up for a long-term collaboration in an ecosystem when they can see a significant positive return. As an ecosystem leader, you must therefore ensure that all partners can capture some of the additional value created by the ecosystem. Of course, the larger the value that is created by the ecosystem, the easier it becomes to share that value in a fair way among the partners. But we also observed that successful ecosystem builders pay a lot of attention to creating some element of activity in the ecosystem that they can own and control, and that the ecosystem’s ability to create value for customers depends on this. We compared this to having a keystone, i.e., the central stone or other piece at the apex of an arch or vault, that keeps the arch together. Such a keystone does not have to be big. But it should be something that is essential to keeping the ecosystem together, and that all partners in the ecosystem will rely on. In the case of Haier, it is the platform on which all the micro-enterprises work. In the case of Alibaba, we found that it is the control over the data. The management of Alibaba has stated several times that they are willing to let go many of the activities they currently perform on their platform, and hand these over to partners. But the control over the data of suppliers, customers or service providers helps them to build up profiles that enable more targeted marketing information, and deep insight, for example, into credit worthiness. It also enables them to create ‘tollgates’ where they can charge for the use of such data in transactions. Having such a keystone enables you to get value out of the ecosystem.

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A fourth lesson from the business world is that managing an ecosystem requires a different mindset and skills for the person who leads the ecosystem. As you need to manage people who are outside your organisation you must develop the capacity to listen to the weak signals that may come from your partners, have the ability to nudge them in the right directions, deploy soft power that comes from vision, credibility and respect and evidence to bolster your case with partners, and generally speaking practice a form of collaborative leadership.

Good luck in building your ecosystems to innovate. And learn from your partners!

About the author Arnoud De Meyer is University Professor at Singapore Management University (SMU). Previously, he was the founding dean of the Asia Campus of INSEAD, the Director of Cambridge Judge Business School and President of SMU. He is a director of several listed companies and non-profit organisations. He is currently also the Chair of the EQUIS Accreditation Board. His most recent book, co-authored with P. J. Williamson, on ‘Ecosystem Edge: Sustaining Competitiveness in the face of Disruption’ was published by Stanford University Press.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

By Markus Kreutzer and Pia Neudert

Ecosystem Orchestration – much more than Strategic Alliance Management

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Special supplement | Ecosystem Orchestration – much more than Strategic Alliance Management | Markus Kreutzer and Pia Neudert

Ecosystems are definued as novel forms of organising that are based on non-generic, multi-lateral complementarities among diverse firms, startups, institutions, and other actors. Thus, firms mutually grant access to assets and resources in order to create more value to the customer or to reduce costs substantially

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n today’s interconnected world, building and growing a company requires one not only to offer a solid value proposition to the customer but also to manage interrelations with a multitude of partners that co-create value. Instead of tightly controlling dyadic alliances, firms need to align a variety of complementary solutions, always having customer preferences in mind. As a result, companies nowadays orchestrate entire “ecosystems” in order to deliver complex cross-industry solutions to their customers.

From an academic perspective, Jacobides, Cennamo, and Gawer (2018) define ecosystems as novel forms of organising that are based on non-generic, multi-lateral complementarities among diverse firms, startups, institutions, and other actors. Thus, firms mutually grant access to assets and resources in order to create more value to the customer or to reduce costs substantially. All of this happens in settings where each player conforms to a certain role that makes the ecosystem flourish: from a leading “orchestrator” to partners on equal levels to small niche players. As a result, we can observe several paradigm shifts in the way that partner management (and strategic management in general) works when operating in an ecosystem environment.

Paradigm shift #1: From creating competitive advantage to contributing to a focal value proposition In order to succeed in an ecosystem, firstly, the value proposition to the customer needs to be clarified. Instead of fighting for a piece of the pie, ecosystem members need to adopt the mindset of enlarging the pie. While established strategy would recommend delineating competitive advantages, nowadays, competitors are increasingly starting to collaborate. This collaboration may manifest, for instance, in agreeing on standardised interfaces for complementors, in bundling complementary resources (e.g., technological platforms), or in hosting joint matchmaking programs to find novel complementors for the ecosystem.

For instance, Amazon, Apple, and Google individually launched smart home ecosystems.

However, in order to enable various complementors to contribute to smart home services, they created a standardisation programme. Together with the Zigbee Alliance, the three orchestrators Amazon, Apple, and Google established a standardisation working group, so that complementors, such as Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), IKEA, and Resideo, could freely decide where to offer complementary 12

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

products and services. Still, each orchestrator kept their smart home ecosystem independent by offering distinct solutions.

Providing a focal value proposition together with a variety of complementors also challenges traditional corporate hierarchies for decision making. To develop solutions across functional silos and organisational boundaries, firms tend to adopt more flexible ways of working. Instead of conforming to established organisational routines, new paradigms like cross-functional Tribes, Squads, or other forms of agile teams drive the respective value creation steps with end-to-end accountability.

While young companies are often “agile natives,” incumbents have to embark on an organisational transformation journey. Balancing clear processes along corporate hierarchies with re-designed agile units and fully experimental setups (e.g., corporate venturing units) requires a differentiated understanding of which organisational design optimally contributes to value co-creation (on an ecosystem level) and value capture (on an organisational level).

Paradigm shift #2: From thinking in opposites to embracing dualities Coopetition – the act of cooperation between competing firms – is a well-known and well-studied phenomenon in strategic alliance management.

In addition to the interplay of cooperation and competition, ecosystem orchestration often requires a duality perspective on other seemingly contradictory situations. Wareham, Fox, and Cano Giner (2014), for instance, describe how ecosystem orchestrators need to balance tensions like openness versus closedness, standard versus variety, or individualism versus collectivism. Instead of seeing these contradictions as opposite sides of a medal (i.e., dualism), firms are called to embrace a duality perspective; like Yin and Yang in East Asian philosophies, the seemingly contradictory concepts come together to form a whole and yet remain distinct.

Ecosystem orchestrators have to navigate a delicate balance between such tensions, being aware of the fact that it is not always possible 13

Coopetition – the act of cooperation between competing firms – is a well-known and well-studied phenomenon in strategic alliance management. In addition to the interplay of cooperation and competition, ecosystem orchestration often requires a duality perspective on other, seemingly contradictory situations.

to be clearly positioned on one or the other side of the continuum. For example, when it comes to the “open versus closed” opposition, Apple tried to navigate towards a more “closed” smartphone ecosystem while Samsung and Google tended towards a more open ecosystem with Android operating software. In recent years, however, Apple realised that it needed to open up certain parts of its ecosystem to take advantage of the value co-creation potential of complementors.

Alternatively, innovation ecosystem orchestrators crack up entire industry paradigms by shifting the balance more towards open ecosystems. For instance, Solarisbank built up a Banking-as-a-Service ecosystem in order to remove the barriers for businesses that want to offer their own financial solutions. Together with Samsung and Visa, for example, Solarisbank provided the technological infrastructure and banking license so that customers in Germany can now use Samsung Pay debit cards without opening up a new bank account but instead by simply linking it to an existing one. Thus, while conforming to the tight regulation (and collaboration) standards of the banking industry, novel technologies now enable non-financial players to offer innovative solutions.

Leaders of companies active in ecosystems therefore need to achieve a mindset shift from opposites (“them versus us”) to a complementarityoriented attitude (“collaborative but distinct”). As a result, managers in such settings often have to build multi-faceted identities and distinguish between their internal corporate role and the role they play with other ecosystem participants.

Special supplement | Ecosystem Orchestration – much more than Strategic Alliance Management | Markus Kreutzer and Pia Neudert

Paradigm shift #3: From “having a clear vision” to “working with proto-visions” The multitude of actors and relationships in ecosystems often leads to distinct challenges to ecosystem growth. In particular, due to the large number of complementors, ecosystem orchestrators often cannot pronounce a clear ex-ante vision for the entire ecosystem. Instead, a so-called proto-vision, as it was termed by Dattée, Alexy, and Autio (2018), is iteratively transformed into a clear vision as the ecosystem matures. Along this process, different ecosystem actors weigh up the pros and cons of making non-recoverable investments into ecosystems in order to leverage complementary assets.

For instance, when electronic appliances giant Haier set out to implement its ecosystem strategy, the company spun off so-called microenterprises that are self-governing and self-motivated. As also described in a previous interview with CEO Zhang Ruimin published in Global Focus Magazine, employees in Haier’s micro-enterprises were guided to transform into self-managed innovators and collaborators. Although the increasing autonomy

was bundled under the purpose of transforming buyers into lifetime users of products and services, the single companies still had to develop a vision for the respective ecosystems on their own.

Consequently, based on the Internet-of-Things technology, Haier worked out several ecosystems envisioning the “Internet of Food, Internet of Clothing, Internet of Security, Internet of Air, Internet of Water, Internet of Education and Internet of Health”.

However, working with proto-visions does not mean abandoning clear visions entirely.

For instance, if an insurance company today wants to set up a digital health ecosystem, it may have a certain vision in mind (e.g., providing preventative measures before a claim arises, enabling a seamless patient journey for certain diseases, or suggesting data-driven recommendations for customers aiming to improve their health), which then also attracts complementors. However, the ecosystem level vision emerges only after complementors have revealed their contribution to the ecosystem, thereby co-designing the vision for the entire ecosystem.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

We, as educators, have to sensitise our students to work more collaboratively but also to work with increased uncertainty.

While this can lead to more friction, it also provides room to manoeuvre, often based on a trial-and-error mindset

What this means for us as educators We observe that companies from a wide range of industries can no longer serve the increased customer demands as single players. Instead, with increasingly specialised and complex business problems to be solved, firms shift towards ecosystems in order to bundle their complementary resources and offer modular products and services. As De Meyer (2021) also pointed out in the preceding article on what business schools can learn from business ecosystems, a mindset shift among all involved stakeholders is necessary.

We expand his argumentation by stressing the value of togetherness (‘contributing to a focal value proposition’), working with tensions and contradictions (‘embracing dualities’), and active acceptance of uncertainty (‘working with proto-visions’).

Consequently, apart from instilling an ecosystem mindset in business school leaders, our curricula and didactic tools also need to incorporate and convey these mindset changes. We, as educators, have to sensitise our students to work more collaboratively but also to work with increased uncertainty. While this can lead to more friction, it also provides room to manoeuvre, often based on a trial-and-error mindset. Allahar and Sookram (2019) even suggest that business schools need to transform towards entrepreneurial ecosystems that empower students to actively contribute to building an ecosystem that includes all members of a university’s network.

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Hence, continuing De Meyer’s (2021) line of argumentation, business schools may become a physical and virtual “platform” for the exchange of knowledge, innovative and entrepreneurial activity, and life-long learning. As educators, we must therefore open up and accept that our own faculty is not the sole provider of content, but that other sources, like MOOCs (e.g., Coursera), TED Talks, or EdTech start-ups (e.g., TOMORROW’s education) can provide complementary knowledge. It remains our mission as business schools, however, to add our own specific “touch”, the personal interaction, and take over the mediation role between the different parties in our ecosystems (e.g., research and practice). Ultimately, this is also our lever for sustainably capturing some of the value in an ecosystem world.

About the authors Markus Kreutzer is Professor of Strategic and International Management at EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht with a focus on interorganisational strategy-making, organisational renewal and adaptation, and business model innovation. From 2017 to 2019 he was Dean of EBS Business School.

Pia Neudert worked for nearly one decade in the aviation industry, where she collected rich managerial experiences in global alliance and joint venture management. Her current research at EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht is in the domain of ecosystems, focusing on configuration, governance, and development aspects.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

By Mark J. Greeven and Dominique V. Turpin

Managing New Business School Ecosystems: Do’s and don’ts

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Special supplement | Managing New Business School Ecosystems | Mark J. Greeven and Dominique V. Turpin

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usiness schools should be at the forefront of supporting businesses in finding their way into the future. Therefore, when business realities change, so too do the realities for business schools and swift adaptation is required.

To meet a host of challenges ranging from the acceleration of digital transformation, strategic sustainability initiatives and evolving social needs, businesses continue to respond in innovative ways.

One such response is to leverage resources from outside of their own company walls. Ecosystems of partners have thus emerged as a way for businesses to organise themselves for the future.

From tech giants, such as Alibaba and Amazon, to traditional businesses in healthcare (Bayer), automotive (BMW), and manufacturing (Caterpillar), the list of business ecosystems is multiplying at a high pace. But how does the rise of ecosystems impact global business schools? In this article, we outline what ecosystems are, how they are changing business realities, and what business schools should do to respond to stay relevant.

Business ecosystems?

Business ecosystems are boundary-less organisations of interdependent businesses with customer-centric offerings that can range across industries. As with a biological ecosystem, each entity in a business ecosystem affects and is affected by the others. This creates a perpetually evolving relationship in which each entity must be flexible and adaptive enough to survive the changes. Organisations are also moving away from rigid pyramids of organisational hierarchies towards hybrid approaches that confer more autonomy and resilience. Rather than following strict, top-down, strategic directives, business ecosystems are managed by guiding principles and data-driven insights that make the sum of their parts greater than the whole. In business terms, the offerings of a business ecosystem can better meet customer needs than individual offerings.

Business ecosystems are boundary-less organisations of interdependent businesses with customer-centric offerings that can range across industries. As with a biological ecosystem, each entity in a business ecosystem affects and is affected by the others. This creates a perpetually evolving relationship in which each entity must be flexible and adaptive enough to survive the changes

Challenging leadership and strategy in businesses in ecosystems Although some claim these organisations will capture a (very) large portion of the value added to the economy, for many executives the question remains as to what extent business ecosystems are relevant to them. Whether a company orchestrates, contributes to, or remains relatively distant from a business ecosystem, it is important to note that the way strategy is developed and executed to create a competitive advantage in this new reality is changing in three ways: • The source of competitive advantage has shifted, from cost and differentiation to network effects and complementarities, from sustainable to temporary advantages.

• Strategy is changing, from top-down prescriptive strategy to balancing deliberate and emergent strategy processes in real time.

AI-supported decision making is significantly changing functional areas such as human resources, marketing and operations.

• Business ecosystems pose a leadership challenge: leading in a digital-enabled ecosystem requires a balancing act to coordinate your own strategy with that of your partners. The leader’s role is to manage tensions and bring purpose to a boundaryless organisation.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

An effective ecosystem leader must master a simple contradiction: pushing teams out of their comfort zones in order to learn vital new digital skills, while simultaneously creating environments that are as comfortable and supportive as possible in order to foster innovation and creative risk-taking

Fundamentally, future leaders need to challenge traditional leadership and strategy roles. Digital technology is the cornerstone of these ecosystems and significantly impacts not only how strategy is designed and executed, but also how organisations are to be led. An effective ecosystem leader must master a simple contradiction: pushing teams out of their comfort zones in order to learn vital new digital skills, while simultaneously creating environments that are as comfortable and supportive as possible in order to foster innovation and creative risk-taking.

What business schools should do to respond At the end of the seventies, Tom Peters announced that we should move beyond the matrix organisation to match accelerating business environments. The same holds true for business schools of the future.

We see two ways forward: 1. Expanding the content and format of business education 2. Changing the way we organise business education While the former builds on what business schools already have – excellent faculty, content, pedagogical experience – the risk lies in making incremental improvements to an outdated model of business education. The second approach is more promising: adapting to the changing needs of businesses by building ecosystems.

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A number of business schools are already taking advantage of their proximity to other colleges within the same university to develop ecosystem relationships (e.g., MIT Sloan School of Management, Stanford, and Harvard Business Schools in the USA, but also Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge in the UK).

There are two main motivations for business schools to embed themselves in ecosystems of capabilities. First, to meet the changing needs of digital leadership and strategy requires competences that are traditionally not within the business school domain, such as artificial intelligence for decision making. In contrast to changes in tools – such as the laptop, mobile phone and internet – these represent step changes in technology-driven business environments.

Secondly, curriculum needs are changing.

Where there used to be a stable and predictable curriculum to educate future leaders – ranging from specialisations such as finance, to general management skills – we now find a constantly evolving set of topics. As a result, more business schools are looking outside their organisational boundaries for differentiation, for example, in the fields of technology, sociology or arts. Operating alone, business schools will not be able to keep up with, let alone lead these trends.

Special supplement | Managing New Business School Ecosystems | Mark J. Greeven and Dominique V. Turpin

How is IMD responding?

As a global business school that focuses almost exclusively on executive education, IMD is most affected by changing market needs. Further, as an independent business school, it has no access to the pre-existing, broad-ranging ecosystem of a traditional university. This vacuum has impelled IMD to explore deep partnerships that enable it to offer both flexibility and expertise to its clients.

Over the past 20 years, various experiments have been launched, with mixed results. More recently, however, a couple of projects have found great success. One example is a special relationship with EPFL (école polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne). EPFL has been at the forefront of several state-of-the-art innovations, including Apple’s Siri technology, the development of Solar Impulse – the first plane to fly around the world on solar energy – and the “Blue Brain” project, considered by many as the world-leading research project on AI. The key programme developed together by IMD and EPFL is “TransformTECH”1 , which leverages 1 https://www.imd.org/tt/technology-business-transformation/

the best that each institution has to offer: deep tech and business expertise. The programme combines insights into AI and data analytics, intelligent robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT) with project-based strategic planning and innovation exercises. Its inception has allowed IMD to offer business executives hands-on interactive opportunities to explore how some of the latest technological developments will impact their businesses. Since it launched in 2018, it has experienced high rates of enrolment, positive feedback from executives, and it has helped re-position IMD as a school on the forefront of cross-sector partnerships, bridging the gap between business and cutting-edge technology.

TransformTECH’s success seeded a second ecosystem partnership between IMD, EPFL, and a third partner, the University of Lausanne (UNIL). The three institutions joined together at the end of 2019 to create the ambitious Enterprise for Society Center (E4S), an academic centre dedicatedto accelerating the transition toward a more resilient, environmentally responsible and inclusive economy.

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Many business schools have no choice but to get actively involved in new eco-ventures because business issues are increasingly interlinked to societal, technological and environmental challenges. Business schools must act in order to respond to market requests and differentiate their curriculum as well as their identity

Founded to leverage the distinct but interrelated expertise of each institution towards a single goal, E4S will launch a new master’s program in sustainable management and technology in September 2021. The Centre’s collective reach has already been established with the publication of several collaborative papers and research articles along with the organisation of well-attended Zoom forums on inclusive capitalism, the future of work, and the Swiss Responsible Business Initiative, a contentiously debated ballot initiative.

Another example of IMD’s emerging ecosystem is illustrated by its relationship with ECAL2 – one of the world’s leading design academies – also based in Lausanne. The two institutions have co-created a multi-day executive education programme to be launched this year. The Leading by Design program is an extension of a long-standing collaboration between the two institutes through which ECAL master’s students have participated in IMD programmes, cross-pollinating ideas between the worlds of industry and design aesthetics.

Dr. Greeven, co-author of this article, will co-direct the new Leading by Design programme. The partnership offers mutual benefits: IMD executives will learn more about how to lead innovation and creativity, while ECAL designers and artists will better understand how executives think and how they can better monetise art and design.

While some of these collaborations have been successful, others continue to be finessed, and a few have offered crucial lessons. Here is what we have learnt so far: 2 ECAL: Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne

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1. Get commitment from the top Getting a long-term commitment from top management is critical in order to ensure proper institutional support for the partnership. By aligning key leaders, the deployment of key resources and the buy-in from internal and external stakeholders enables a smoother roll-out. However, it’s also important to get formal institutional commitment since we have seen cases where a change in leadership led to the slow death of a project.

2. Focus, focus, focus!

A clearly defined purpose for the project is another key factor in its potential success.

Ambitious collaborations require two teams to work together to create something new. Distinct processes must, therefore, cohere and this is achieved through clear, simple outcomes that will ensure the proper mobilisation of resources and impact. As one experienced colleague observes: ‘These projects often look like we’re trying to marry a rabbit with a fish… Often, partners have different business models, institutional cultures, levels of commitments, financial expectations, paces of thinking and execution.’ Therefore, the better defined and more focused the project is, the greater its chances of success.

Special supplement | Managing New Business School Ecosystems | Mark J. Greeven and Dominique V. Turpin

60%

According to McKinsey, about 60 percent of business joint ventures fail, we suspect that managing business school ecosystems is just as risky

3. Deploy ‘champions’ with open minds We find a lot of independent minds in the academic world and it is not always easy to find alignment among smart colleagues. However, when two open-minded people are ready to commit the proper support and energy to designing and running a program, mobilise colleagues and fine-tune the details of the execution they can prove far more effective than larger teams with ill-defined commitment.

4. Define responsibilities It is critical to define who does what and to balance responsibilities between the players.

The consequences of not doing so can lead to failure. In one case it was unclear who was is in charge of recruiting participants, leading to the entire project being disbanded.

5. Clarify what success will be What gets measured gets done. Therefore, set out how successes will be measured in the short, medium and long term. Establishing milestones, regular reviews and follow-up sessions are vital.

6. Experiment, fail fast (if needed) and move on Not every project is successful. Experience shows that when a project does not meet its objectives, it is better to accept this, learn from one’s mistakes and move on rather than to drag the process out and get caught in an infinite blame game. According to McKinsey, about 60 percent of business joint ventures fail. Although we do not have the data yet, we suspect that managing business school ecosystems is probably just as risky.

3 Interview by Noel Tichy and Ram Charan; Harvard Business Review (March-April 1995)

In conclusion, many business schools have no choice but to get actively involved in new eco-ventures because business issues are increasingly interlinked to societal, technological and environmental challenges. Business schools must act in order to respond to market requests and differentiate their curriculum as well as their identity.

If crafting ecosystem strategies is a challenge, executing them is even more demanding. To paraphrase, Larry Bossidy, the former CEO of Honeywell: ‘At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies. Strategies are intellectually simple; their execution is not.Your strategies will not give you better results. Of course, you want to have a good idea of where you're going, but that's not enough. The question is: Can you execute? That's what differentiates one company from another.’3

About the authors Mark J. Greeven is a Chinese-speaking Dutch Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD Business School in Switzerland and former faculty at China’s leading innovation institute at Zhejiang University. He is the author of “Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Changemakers, and Underdogs” (MIT Press, 2019) and “Business Ecosystems in China” (Routledge, 2017).

Dominique V. Turpin is a French-born Swiss Professor of Marketing Strategy and the former Dean and President of IMD. He received his PhD from Sophia University in Japan and currently serves on various business and academic boards.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

By Amanda Gudmundsson and Robina Xavier

Revisiting a business school’s impact agenda in an ecosystems environment

T

he impact of business schools is a muchdebated topic both within the academy and more broadly. As academic institutions, business schools have a vital role to play in advancing the academic discipline of management education and its various subsidiaries and representing these areas in inter-disciplinary research tackling significant global challenges. Following Thomas and Starkey’s proposition of business ‘at the heart of a global society’ (Thomas/Starkey, ‘What should business schools be for?’ in EFMD Global Focus, 13(3), 2019, 41), we believe of equal importance is the impact business schools have on the policy environment that drives societal impact and the practice of the profession of ethical, sustainable, and responsible business. An ecosystems approach allows us to integrate these various societal and business-led elements of our impact agenda and achieve deep, sustainable positive impact across local, national and global platforms.

Developments such as increased competition for students and faculty, significant uncertainty in funding and governmental support, changing expectations of our stakeholders as to the legitimacy of the study of business and significant technological changes are all challenging business schools beyond the more immediate challenges of a global pandemic. Where there is challenge, there is opportunity. Schools are revisiting their missions and purpose and increasing the transparency of

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Where there is challenge, there is opportunity. Schools are revisiting their missions and purpose and increasing the transparency of their operations, resource scarcity is leading to a focus on quality and differentiation, and technology advances are opening up new markets for those who can truly demonstrate their point of difference

their operations, resource scarcity is leading to a focus on quality and differentiation, and technology advances are opening up new markets for those who can truly demonstrate their point of difference.

As schools revisit what they stand for and want to achieve in advancing societal issues, questions will arise on how such impacts will be achieved within resource constrained environments, and alternative approaches will be considered.

Special supplement | Revisiting a business school’s impact agenda in an ecosystems environment | Amanda Gudmundsson and Robina Xavier

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University planning and accreditation systems have focused attention on impact agendas which are often characterised by the work of our faculty and students resulting in short term changes that can be identified and reported upon. How many organisations have implemented a new process developed by co-operative research? How many faculty have presented to government inquiries and helped write/rewrite government legislation? How have student projects helped community groups and those most vulnerable in our society? Such questions frequently arise under these approaches and privilege the work of the university, its faculty and students in influencing others. An ecosystems approach allows us to reconsider our impact agenda as one of “impact with” as well as “impact on”, capturing the true spirit of interorganisational collaboration for innovative outcomes while still recognising the needs of different partners. It has the potential to support our schools to do more with less and to expand the reach of our impact while still allowing for our differentiation in a crowded space.

This approach aligns closely with a number of the keys of ecosystem advantage identified by Williamson and de Meyer (‘Ecosystem advantage: How to successfully harness the power of partners’, California Management Review, 2012, 55(1), 24-46; see also the contribution by de Meyer in this supplement). To be effective under the ecosystem model, schools will need to make long-term commitment to their impact agendas, however defined, as working in partnership is complex, time-consuming and will require experimentation along the way. Importantly, this approach privileges the needs of all parts of the ecosystem in achieving sustainable impact while still recognising the central role of the orchestrator as outlined by de Meyer in this supplement which could be taken by the business school or one of its partners or shared in different contexts as different parts of impact agendas are enacted.

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Williamson and de Meyer outline the need to be clear of the added value that each potential partner brings to the ecosystem table to ensure appropriate complementarities are achieved.

Schools can revisit their existing partner rosters using this parameter as a new lens to review the value of existing ecosystem members as well as gaps in their roster for those areas needed to achieve the stated mission and purpose.

Ecosystem members could be sourced from a wide range of stakeholders including other business schools as discussed by Greeven and Turpin in this supplement, within a spirit of collaboration over competition to ensure that bigger goals can be achieved. For example, a long-term, seven-year relationship among three Business Schools in Australia, Queensland University of Technology, the University of Queensland, and Griffith University in collaboration with government and industry fostered the creation and continued support of the Global Business Challenge (https://globalbusinesschallenge.org/).

The Challenge annually activates hundreds of PhD and graduate students from around the world to develop novel and sustainable technological solutions to major global problems such as food and water security, resource recovery, and the circular economy. The partnership has enabled globally relevant cross-border and cross-discipline solutions to flourish. The joining of collective networks, specialist expertise and limited resources through an ecosystem model has resulted in larger and more impactful outcomes than any of the individual business schools could have achieved by acting independently.

Business schools often display their extensive list of university and industry partners in accreditation reviews but it is less clear in these presentations how each partner is engaging with the school and vice versa to achieve sustainable impact across the learning and teaching and/or research agendas. Interrogation of such lists

Special supplement | Revisiting a business school’s impact agenda in an ecosystems environment | Amanda Gudmundsson and Robina Xavier

The joining of collective networks, specialist expertise and limited resources through an ecosystem model has resulted in larger and more impactful outcomes than any of the individual business schools could have achieved by acting independently

often reveals the significant challenge placed on academic leaders regarding how to manage large partnership rosters with little differentiation of outcomes over long periods of time. All partnerships are not, and should not be the same if the school is to best utilise its scarce resources in partner interaction and achieve its impact agenda in the most efficient manner.

Under Williamson and de Meyer’s guidelines, schools should ensure they establish an appropriate structure for differentiating partner roles to achieve ‘specialisation and focus’ (p. 33) as well as manageability of the ecosystem.

A deliberate partnership with defined roles, responsibilities and timeframe consolidates the focus and impact of the ecosystem’s collective intelligence. In 2015, for example, QUT in collaboration with a small group of four futurefocused industry and government partners created a five-year initiative for a Chair in Digital Economy (https://chairdigitaleconomy.com.au). Each party to the agreement brought specialist expertise and dedicated resources working within agreed roles for the five-year horizon. All of the parties had worked together prior to this venture but the relationship management structure was elevated for this initiative. As explained by Kreutzer and Neudert in this issue, the ecosystem benefited from the use of proto-visions rather than having one clear vision of the entire five-year journey given the 25

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

significant pace of change in the environment.

The ecosystem was established to explore the unknown and to facilitate an understandingof the impact of the emerging digital economy concept on business, technology, and society. Fast forward five years, and the ecosystem has developed into a respected research centre showcasing global insights through innovation and ideation sprints, policy and research reports, corporate education, CEO roundtables, industry events, podcasts, as well as traditional academic publications and keynote presentations. Different partnership structures are being utilised for the next stage of development recognising the evolving nature of the ecosystem.

Both of these steps – designing a roster of appropriate partners and clarity of roles – strongly support the third key element recommended by Williamson and de Meyer which emphasises ‘flexibility and co-learning’ (p. 33). This approach is designed to encourage continuous interaction to accelerate knowledge creation for all partners, thereby allowing the school to tackle more complex projects with wider impact.

Of course, the use of ecosystems for the co-creation and generation of knowledge is not limited to University and industry research initiatives or innovations hubs. Industry and government partnerships with universities for teaching and education have a long history. Employers are often quick to recognise the benefits of education for workforce capability development, with some seeking the generation of specific and long-term relationships with universities to enhance the talent and capability of their employees. The Public Sector Management Program at QUT is an example of such an ecosystem. The programme is a business school collaboration with the Australian Public Service, providing co-created postgraduate education for mid-level managers in Australian government and non-government organisations. The program has enjoyed an impactful thirty-year history demonstrating that sustainable partnerships to co-create and collaborate on educational initiatives can continue to evolve and support talent enhancement and innovation.

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The ecosystem was established to explore the unknown and to facilitate an understanding of the impact of the emerging digital economy concept on business, technology, and society.

Fast forward five years, and the ecosystem has developed into a respected research centre showcasing global insights through innovation and ideation sprints, policy and research reports, corporate education, CEO roundtables, industry events, podcasts, as well as traditional academic publications and keynote presentations

Special supplement | Revisiting a business school’s impact agenda in an ecosystems environment | Amanda Gudmundsson and Robina Xavier

However, the growth and concern over management education is greater than any single business school and is a global conversation incorporating the economic and social challenges of responsibility and sustainability. The deliberate global ecosystem established by the UN Global Compact’s Principles for Responsible Management Education initiative provides an open global platform for debate, knowledge sharing, and for catalysing change in management education.

PRME has now also developed an ecosystem blueprint with examples and frameworks to support business schools with the integration of the UN’s sustainable development goals into curriculum, research, and partnerships (https://www.unprme. org/resources-1). The recommendations included in the PRME blueprint enable business school leaders to ‘broaden horizons’ as recommended

by Starkey and Thomas (‘The future of business schools: Shut them down or broaden our horizons?’

EFMD Global Focus, 13(2), 2019, 44-49) and redefine their quality and impact. Engagement with initiatives that provide access to ecosystems of networks such as PRME or the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (https://grli.org) provide an additional pathway and links for business school leaders to build partnerships that inspire action.

Greeven and Turnpin’s article in this issue emphasised digital technology as a way forward, enabling business school ecosystems to expand content and change the format of business education. Indeed, digital transformation has been the refrain throughout the 2020 global pandemic with business schools and industry accelerating global collaboration to meet stakeholder needs.

Globally, business schools have worked with international education partners to enable students to participate in digital international experiences.

Discussions of partnership and co-design often lead to questions surrounding the ownership of the designed agenda – whose impact agenda is it? The orchestration goal of the purposefully established ecosystem is to establish a mechanism to add more value and impact than can be achieved through current systems. As de Meyer noted in this supplement, ecosystems are advantageous because they bring together unique capabilities, knowledge, and the ability to learn faster, while offering flexibility over the inclusion and removal of partners. This will require cultural change within our business schools to capture the benefits of the ecosystem approach while minimising the negative effects of ceding direct control. Will the business schools of the future become focused and specialised, embracing the spirit of co-opetition and partnership with other stakeholders to generate ecosystems for innovation, research and education? This may not happen quickly and there may be some false starts – just like all new things we try. For schools who are currently achieving all their impact goals, perhaps the investment is too great. But for others with ambitious impact agendas in ever increasingly complex environments, harvesting the benefits of a different approach in purposeful collaboration will allow our schools to truly demonstrate their current and future value both within and outside the academy.

About the authors Amanda Gudmundsson is Executive Dean of the QUT Business School, QUT, Brisbane, Australia. Her research and teaching on self-leadership has focused on improving the growth and development of leaders at all levels.

Robina Xavier is Deputy Vice Chancellor and Vice President (Education) at QUT, Brisbane, Australia. She is the former Executive Dean of the QUT Business School and has focused her scholarship on crisis management and investor relations.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

By Denis Konanchuk and Marat Atnashev

Company-led Learning Ecosystems

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Special supplement | Company-led Learning Ecosystems | Denis Konanchuk and Marat Atnashev

C

70%

he shelf-life of skills is getting shorter, with 70% of businesses agreeing that skills are becoming outdated faster than ever before

ompanies all around the world are facing a new challenge as the rise of business ecosystems breaks down industry borders and leads to hyper-competition for customers and corporate executives as well as corporate talent. Business leaders have to adjust their strategies and reinvent business models. They have to move more credibly forward in introducing client-centric approaches, data-driven and technology-enhanced processes and flexible organisational structures to respond to uncertainty and traditional markets disruption.

Companies aim to lock in customers within their business ecosystem by providing outstanding customer experience and personalised solutions.

This illustrates a new type of competition both nationally and in the global arena.

When aiming to succeed in this new environment, employee talent is becoming the new currency that will define company prospects.

The shelf-life of skills is getting shorter, with 70% of businesses agreeing that skills are becoming outdated faster than ever before (Vodafone Global Trends Barometer 2019). Employees are supposed to work and perform effectively at higher uncertainty and pace, not just in a “run” mode, but also in the “change” and “disrupt” ones. This calls for new set of hybrid skills, including self-awareness and client-focus, resilience and agility, teamwork and leadership, digital and professional skills.

Companies embracing this future should invest more credibly in life-long learning as a continuous means of talent development and then focus on the recruitment of talent that fits this model.

From a broader perspective, the entire educational system does not meet the needs of modern companies. The industrial "assembly line" model for groups of students can't satisfy personal needs for the career development and lifelong learning of a talented employee. Learning is no longer just about content and knowledge. Learning is about experience, reflection and application.

The emerging business ecosystems blur the borders of companies and lead to cross-industrial business models.

For talent management, they mean that learning is no longer limited to internal groups of high-performance employees

The emerging business ecosystems blur the borders of companies and lead to cross-industrial business models. For talent management, they mean that learning is no longer limited to internal groups of high-performance employees (HiPo).

Modern organisations have to pay more attention to teaching talents outside their organisation, providing new experience, knowledge and skills to partners, suppliers and even customers. It leads to cross-functional projects and solutions which allow all parties of the business ecosystem to co-develop and grow. As an example, the Alfa Group has launched “Alfa Battle”, a joint recruiting campaign to attract talented digital professionals and IT-specialists to Alfa-Bank, AlfaStrakhovanie and X5 Retail Group. Another example was when International Paper, together with SKOLKOVO Business School and Oregon University, launched an educational program on forestry in 2021, bringing together forestry enterprises, specialised universities and NGOs with a view to distributing international forestry standards and crossindustrial, sustainable development projects.

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Traditional L&D Function

Company-led learning ecosystem

Corporate L&D Unit

External educational resources

Programmes portfolio

Employee Cohorts

Skills & Knowledge assessment

Coaching

Individual learning-career path

Trainings Programmes

Mentors

Online courses

Meet ups Real projects

Business cases

Internal educational resources

• Preparing for the current workplace

• Support long-term career goals

• Standard programmes for groups of employees

• Individual learning paths for employees and

• Top-down approach (learning objectives and budgets)

Figure 1

Embracing the business ecosystem concept requires the revision of the learning and development function within a business organisation. The education model should reflect the novel business context and focus on employees’ individual learning paths. Corporate education is not just a portfolio of training programs, but a company-led learning ecosystem, which creates space for state-of-the-art educational opportunities within and beyond company boundaries, so that all employees are able to build their individual educational trajectories in pursuit of their individual career goals in the best interests of the company (see figure 1).

This goal is achieved when the learning ecosystem supports the company’s strategic priorities: • Retention and development of employees by synchronising their learning and career paths throughout the entire company and beyond.

• Developing organisational flexibility by instant skills and knowledge upgrade.

• Setting up a comfortable work environment, focused on performance and knowledge exchange across industries, by changing HR-processes with the employees’ perspective and needs in mind.

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external talents (partners, customers) • Diversity of learners – <money follow the employee >

58%

According to LinkedIn (‘Workplace Learning Report’, LinkedIn, 2018), 58 percent of employees prefer to learn at their own pace

Special supplement | Company-led Learning Ecosystems | Denis Konanchuk and Marat Atnashev

49%

According to LinkedIn (‘Workplace Learning Report’, LinkedIn, 2018), 49 percent prefer to learn at the point of need

The company-led learning ecosystem model is based on five key principles: 1. Employee-/learner-centric approach The employee is put at the forefront, and the company becomes an architect of first-rate solutions for each employee’s career-learning journey. According to LinkedIn (‘Workplace Learning Report’, LinkedIn, 2018), 58 percent of employees prefer to learn at their own pace and 49 percent prefer to learn at the point of need.

The HR-team becomes a connector to business functions, ensuring that personal learning paths are synchronised with corporate strategy and with any new capabilities required for an emerging business model. Learning paths provide a smooth journey from novice to mastery in multiple specialisations, so that the employee is no longer stuck in his (her) current job position. This also requires data collection and analysis of the employee's digital footprint related to workplace and learning activities. As an example, in SberBank’s learning ecosystem, employees have the opportunity to apply for digital skills courses and on successful completion, they can apply for new digital job positions and change their career track.

2. Diversity and autonomy of participants under the general rules All participants of the learning ecosystem have a high level of autonomy and responsibility for their personal development. However, they act according to the rules established by the company. Autonomy means that the top-down budgeting approach for corporate education is replaced with the principle that “money follows the employee”. The learner can decide what learning path to choose with support of a learning advisor or AI-recommendation system.

Employees are therefore learning partners rather than students. Diversity means that the company

should think beyond their own organisation in order to provide a wide range of excellent learning formats, including: training developed in-house, online courses, external programmes in partnerships with educational institutions and other companies, field trips and real-life projects, space for reflection, and knowledge-sharing events within professional communities. Assessment becomes crucial as it ensures transferrable certificates and continuity of diverse learning activities.

3. Openness and partnerships: thinking beyond organisation As business ecosystems emerge, many companies become more open and ought to focus not just on their own employees but also on talents currently residing outside the company.

New ideas and innovations come from external start-ups, technological partners, suppliers and customers. A business ecosystem’s development requires shared standards, cross-industrial knowledge and practices, and common languages for all the partners. A supportive learning ecosystem can establish an open learning space for employees of different organisations to mutual benefit. It’s not just about learning, it’s also about common activities, co-creation of new products or services and bringing added value to the customer.

Reflecting on this trend, it is possible to observe more educational programmes being delivered in partnership (e.g., as consortium programs, involving more than one company). As an example, SeverGroup together with SKOLKOVO Business School, has launched the “Future CEOs” educational programme which brings together HiPos from different companies of the group, representing healthcare, metal, travel, retail and other industries.

Participants of the program learn together to develop core managerial skills and a corresponding mindset, explore new business opportunities and work on cross-industrial business cases.

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4. Complexity management Learning ecosystems come with a high degree of complexity. As it’s nearly impossible to predict the future, it is necessary to act in a mode of experiments, “quick wins” and constant improvements, rather than planning for an “ideal learning ecosystem”. Learning ecosystems emerge as a co-evolution involving all stakeholders – employees, education providers and partners, top-management and HR-teams. A company-led learning ecosystem is not about command and control, it’s about common vision, facilitated experiments with feedback-loop and outcome evaluation that require a new set of KPIs. On the learning activities level, eNPS is the main metric, and this can help to assemble the right mix of learning resources, both interesting and practical for employees. On the learning ecosystem level, tracking retention rates and monthly active users (MAU) help to measure the employees’ experience and engagement. On the corporate level, an employee’s life-time value (= productivity x time working for the company) becomes the major KPI of talent management, transforming learning activities from expenses to investment mode. Most companies are still to develop and implement the Employee Lifetime Value (eLTV) methodology as part of HR performance-management, as the system has to be able to cope with an enormous diversity of roles and job positions.

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Learning ecosystems emerge as a coevolution involving all stakeholders – employees, education providers and partners, top-management and HR-teams.

A company-led learning ecosystem is not about command and control, it’s about common vision, facilitated experiments with feedback-loop and outcome evaluation that require a new set of KPIs.

Special supplement | Company-led Learning Ecosystems | Denis Konanchuk and Marat Atnashev

5. Shared leadership and the new role of the HR team Company-led learning ecosystems operate on the principle of “shared leadership” and “shared power”. There is no HR-demiurge making decisions and allocating budgets from the top of the corporate hierarchy to the lower levels. Every employee shares power and responsibility for their own personal and business development. Every participant of the learning ecosystem has the right to teach and propose new initiatives, if they meet the rules of the ecosystem. The role of the HR-team is to support professional communities within the company and enable employees’ growth by connecting their learning activities with long-term career paths, managing all participants’ sense of purpose and the energy levels. It might also require significant changes in organisational structure and corporate culture of the company.

HR and leadership teams play a key role in these processes. In many “digital native” companies (like Google and similar) with their entrepreneurial culture and “the right for employee to make a mistake”, the shared leadership model is already in place. It is encouraged with hackathons, employee meetups, product labs, and other activities.

To make the learning ecosystem happen, companies should have certain enablers that set common rules for the ecosystem and ensure the integrity and coherence of the career and educational space within and outside the company, including: • A single-ID for the employee to sign-on the learning ecosystem space, which also helps to collect data and provides a digital footprint of all the learning and working activities of each employee.

• A wide range of codified educational resources inside and outside the company.

The learning ecosystem rules should ensure access to these courses and enable transferrable learning results.

• A unified technology platform for the

ecosystem, providing convenient learning spaces (online, face-to-face and blended), career tracking and community management services, as well as personal digital assistants for employees.

• A single support centre for learners (HRpartners, administrators, advisors, mentors).

• A common brand for all activities within the education ecosystem.

Company-led learning ecosystem development is not a revolution. It is an evolution of talent management and learning functions in a company, supporting business ecosystem growth and building on best learning and career development practices within and outside the company. It brings a new logic to a company’s development, based on flexibility, personalisation and partnership.

For the business schools, the new learning ecosystem reality requires a rethink of its competitive positioning and strategic ambitions in the broader management education sector. One option is to stay level and evolve into a niche player, providing excellent learning services in a particular specialisation such as management, marketing, digital transformation etc. The other option is to become an active ecosystem player and partner able to facilitate co-creation based on crossindustrial and multi-disciplinary expertise. This will be critical in enabling a company to better support its HR and CEO teams on their own transformational journey and thereby level institutional impact to new heights, in line with Arnoud de Meyer’s call (in this volume) for business schools to evolve into “Schools for Business”.

About the authors Denis Konanchuk is Head of Executive Education and Professor of Business Practice at Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO. Marat Atnashev is Director of Alfa Group Portfolio Management, member of the Board of Directors of Alfa-Bank and AlfaStrakhovanie, and Professor of Business Practice at Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO. He is also member of the Supervisory Board of X5 Retail Group and others.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

By Xiaobo WU and Linan LEI

Rising Model of “3I” Circles

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I

nnovation and entrepreneurship are widely regarded as the important basis for sustainable competitive advantage by enhancing capabilities for business growth, creating employment opportunities, increasing productivity and promoting national economic development (M. M. Crossan and M. Apaydin, ‘A multi-dimensional framework of organisational innovation’ in Journal of Management Studies, 2010, 47(6), 1154-1191; A. O’Connor, ‘A conceptual framework for entrepreneurship education policy’ in Journal of Business Venturing, 2013, 28, 546-563), especially in a rapidly changing international business environment.

In the last two decades, innovation and entrepreneurship education has become part of the core DNA of Chinese business schools, especially in very dynamic economic areas such as Shanghai and Hangzhou

International industry alliance University

Government Community

Interdisciplinary circle

Interorganisational circle

Industrial Park

Global open innovation platform

National laboratory Incubator

International circle

...

Along with China’s economic “new normal,” Premier Li Keqiang of China introduced the concept of ‘Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation’ at the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos, and innovation and entrepreneurship were then officially defined as an important part of national policy in 2015. Despite the uncertainties brought

by COVID-19 and the resulting global economic recession, China has managed to stabilise its economy and achieved a quick recovery, and the hundreds of millions of market entities with strong resilience have played a fundamental role in this process. Since the key to successful entrepreneurship is innovative talent, Chinese central and provincial-level governments expect college students, people with high quality and ability, to serve as a strong reserve force of entrepreneurial activity. In keeping with the government mandate, universities across the country have created new schools dedicated to innovation, with names such as ‘School of Innovation,’ ‘School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship,’ or ‘School of Entrepreneurship and Management,’ both within and outside existing business schools. Based on the observations and survey of innovation and entrepreneurship education conducted by leading business schools or other schools of higher education in Shanghai and Hangzhou, both located in the Yangtze River Delta, this article incorporates the key lessons into a model of “3I” circles: an interdisciplinary circle within the university, an inter-organisational circle in the surrounding business ecosystem, and an international circle of open collaboration systems.

Figure 1 Model of “3I” circles in innovation and entrepreneurship education

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

Interdisciplinary circle within the university While new venture opportunities exist within nearly all academic disciplines (e.g., graphic arts, computer science, mechanical engineering), the majority of entrepreneurship initiatives at U.S. colleges and universities are offered by business schools for business students (F. O. Ede, B. Panigrahi & S. E. Calcich, ‘African American students' attitudes toward entrepreneurship education’. Journal of Education for Business, 1998, 73, 291-296). In fact, entrepreneurial learning is marked by the training in the areas of creativity, curiosity, and application of knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems or utilise the opportunities that ideally lead to innovation and new venture creation (M. C. Draycott, D. Rae, & K. Vause, ‘The assessment of enterprise education in the secondary education sector: A new approach?’

Education + Training, 2011, 53(8/9), 673–691), in which interdisciplinarity could bring together different areas of knowledge and studies together to work on a specific problem (A. F. Repko, Repko, Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, 2011, Sage).

The first noticeable trend is the renewed attention and trend toward “general education” (通识教育). Institutions such as Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Fudan University, and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (to name just a few) have liberal arts programmes designed to give students a strong foundation in critical thinking as well as to broaden their mind for innovation and entrepreneurship, which are especially aimed at students whose academic background is not business.

The second trend is the establishment of interdisciplinary platforms for non-business students, such as the Intensive Training Program of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (ITP) at Zhejiang University, established in 1999. While interdisciplinarity is not new at the higher education level, such practices of entrepreneurship education well support innovation based on the diverse mixture of individuals from different disciplines who can work together to develop a product or take 36

Special supplement | Rising Model of “3I” Circles | Xiaobo WU and Linan LEI

Government Industry Government Industry

University

University

Figure 2 The Triple-helix model in innovation and entrepreneurship education

3006

By the end of 2020, the programme had supported 3,006 undergraduate entrepreneurship projects amounting to a total of nearly 700 million RMB, and a number of excellent undergraduate entrepreneurship enterprises have emerged

128

More than 1000 new generation entrepreneurs with science or engineering backgrounds have graduated from the programme, while 128 companies have been initiated and four of these have advanced to a public listing

on multiple tasks in a start-up. Through selecting 40-60 undergraduates from various majors in the university annually, the curriculum is designed to encourage innovation-based entrepreneurship.

Until now, more than 1000 new generation entrepreneurs with science or engineering backgrounds have graduated from the programme, while 128 companies have been initiated and four of these have advanced to a public listing. With the collaboration and complementarity in such a interdisciplinary circle, the ITP has been widely regarded as a comprehensive entrepreneurship learning program of a university with the earliest establishment, the largest spill-over effect and the highest maturity of any training system in China.

Inter-organisational circle in business ecosystem Apart from the university itself, governmental agencies are also investing significant efforts in promoting innovative and entrepreneurial activities. Relying on the Shanghai Technology Entrepreneurship Foundation for Graduates (EFG), initiated by the municipal government in 2006, government departments focused on science and technology jointly invest 100 million RMB every

year to support college students’ innovation and entrepreneurship training in the form of public equity investment and interest-free debt financing.

Candidates have the opportunity to be granted funding ranging from 100,000 RMB to 500,000 RMB to set up enterprises. By the end of 2020, the programme had supported 3,006 undergraduate entrepreneurship projects amounting to a total of nearly 700 million RMB, and a number of excellent undergraduate entrepreneurship enterprises have emerged, such as “Ele. Me”, the leading local living platform in China.

Unlike the bilateral relation between universities and government, business ecosystems have become the most important and efficient mechanism of business community engagement and knowledge transfer within the triple helix model of the university-industry-government framework, as observed by the authors in Shanghai and Hangzhou. It mimics the example of other universities located in Europe’s entrepreneurial regions: University of Reading and the University of Sussex, both in the UK, can access extensive support for spin-offs and commercialisation of tacit knowledge (M. Belitski, K. Heron. ‘Expanding entrepreneurship education ecosystems’. The Journal of Management Development, 2017, 36(2), 163-177).

More innovative elements and players can be involved in innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems. neoBay Global Innovation and Entrepreneurship Community, co-founded by Shanghai JiaoTong University, the Government of the Minhang District, and Shanghai Land Minhong (Group) Co. Ltd, is deeply rooted in the inter-organisational circle for innovation and entrepreneurship education in Shanghai. Through the resources provided by the three partners as well as the alumni, the scientific achievements, the operational support structure, the financial services as well as the policy backing, the incubator assumes the responsibility of forging a cluster of scientific innovation in southern Shanghai, establishing an entire industrial chain of innovation and entrepreneurship.

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International circle of open collaboration systems The traditional model of innovation involves a shift toward more open and distributed models, while platformisation is also a driving force with the increasing importance of digital platforms as venues for value creation and delivery in the global market (S. Nambisan, D. Siegel, & M. Kenney. ‘On open innovation, platforms, and entrepreneurship’. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 2018, 12(3), 354-368). International networking in innovation and entrepreneurship education in Shanghai and Hangzhou can be understood as a two-way model, as it both infuses multiple innovative resources into the domestic pool, and also initiates more startups to “go global” by connecting them to resources from the global open business ecosystem.

The Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP), jointly initiated by Zhejiang University (China), Babson College (USA) and EM Lyon Business School (France) in 2009, is the first joint master’s 38

degree program in the field of entrepreneurship across Asia, North America and Europe, aiming to cultivate successful entrepreneurs and top managers with innovative ability and a global mindset by exposing them to the broader trends around the globe. It provides the classical model for transnational entrepreneurship education and much more.

Under a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, Shanghai aims to promote itself as a science and technology innovation hub with global influence. The Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Center of Shanghai actively utilises key platforms such as the UN-assisted South-South Global Assets and Technology Exchange (SS-GATE), which is the first UN global programme agency headquartered in China, to strengthen crossborder technology transfer, attract foreign research institutions, and promote the global engagement of business start-ups. For overseas

Special supplement | Rising Model of “3I” Circles | Xiaobo WU and Linan LEI

Although Shanghai and Hangzhou have a diverse and distinct industrial base, in which the former is on a quest to become a global finance centre while Hangzhou’s economic development relies heavily on small and medium-sized enterprises in manufacturing and digital economy, their lessons in innovation and entrepreneurship education show many parallels in the context of the “3I” framework

talent acquisition, the Offshore Innovation and Entrepreneurship Base for Overseas Talent in China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone (FTZ) has been positioned to radiate global innovation opportunities so as to attract overseas talent. It also provides incubation spaces for companies that are registered in the FTZ and are operating overseas. Similarly, Haichuang Park in Hangzhou has been set up as an innovation and venture platform for overseas high-level talents, established by the Zhejiang government, and featuresabundant technological resources, vibrant regulations and systems, convenient public service, and active entrepreneurship and innovative activities.

Although Shanghai and Hangzhou have a diverse and distinct industrial base, in which the former is on a quest to become a global finance centre while Hangzhou’s economic development relies heavily on small and medium-sized enterprises in manufacturing and digital economy, their lessons in innovation and entrepreneurship education show many parallels in the context of the “3I” framework.

With digital platforms and open innovation environments unleashing numerous promising opportunities for entrepreneurs, the modes and methods in innovation and entrepreneurship education also keep adapting to this changing environment. With more innovative elements being integrated into the “3I” circles, the synergies and complementarities could make the emerging models in global innovation and entrepreneurship education a powerful influence in driving the ecosystem agenda forward.

About the authors Xiaobo WU is Professor of Innovation and Strategic Management, Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, Zhejiang University. He launched the first Innovation & Entrepreneurship Training programme for undergraduates in China in 1999. He was formerly the Dean of the School of Management at Zhejiang University, 2009~2017.

Linan LEI is Assistant Professor of Innovation and Strategic Management, International Business School of Zhejiang University.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

By Giuseppe “Beppe” Soda and Gabriele Troilo

Edtech as a catalyst for the advancement of ecosystem-based management education

E

ducational institutions: from value chains to ecosystems A prolific research stream has investigated the role of universities and schools in innovation ecosystems and their participation as economic development partners with industry and local, state, and national governments. However, the recent developments of business schools’ “business and organisational models” have opened a new question: are the emerging networks surrounding schools and the unbundling process of their provisions transforming them into educational ecosystems?

The question has been raised in the context of the radical transformations of the value chains of schools that are only partially related to the pandemic. Well before the COVID-19 hurricane, the global context of management education was extremely dynamic and competitive, and was experiencing both new entrants and a strong reaction from the incumbent traditional institutions. The main sources of revenue and the traditional forms of delivering management education have been disrupted by technology and by the rise of new competitors who have leveraged new learning technologies. The proliferation of online programs and new learning technologies, boosted by the pandemic, haveled to novel ways of providing students and executives with specialised credentials in 40

part-time, flexible, multidisciplinary and non-degree programmes. In parallel, higher education is experiencing the unbundling revolution. Originally observed in other industries such as TLC and banking, the unbundling of educational services describes the process of disaggregating educational provision into its component parts, very often involving actors external to traditional schools and universities. As a result, a combination of several and intertwined factors are substantially transforming the competitive landscape of the education industry.

Our experience at SDA Bocconi School of Management We believe that the path taken by SDA Bocconi School of Management can be seen as a good example of how a traditional educational institution decided to face the opportunity offered by the technology disruption. Consistent with the organisational identity, we started our own learning process almost ten years ago with the first MOOCs developed for Coursera. We learned how to design an online learning programme and how to interact with a community of thousands of learners.

We developed our internal competences by starting to hire instructional designers, software developers, video-makers and graphic designers

Special supplement | Edtech as a catalyst for the advancement of ecosystem-based management education | Giuseppe “Beppe” Soda and Gabriele Troilo

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in order to produce our first own productions of on-demand and live online programmes.

We invested considerable efforts into training our faculty for their new job of designing online experiences, into making them accept losing part of their self-gratification of performing in a physical classroom in front of an applauding audience, and instead turning to the highly satisfying role of guiding a team of experts working to create unique online experiences.

Meanwhile, we interacted with a number of specialised technology organisations and adopted new languages, new routines, and new operational models. In 2020, we felt we were ready to launch a new Division for Online Learning with the double role of orchestrating internal competences developed over the past few years, and, more importantly, of orchestrating the external network of international educational platforms, video production companies, podcast producing companies, UX designers and film-making companies, with the final goal of delivering unique online learning experiences.

Online Learning as an ecosystem Online learning is naturally conceivable as an ecosystem. In fact, for online learning to occur, two complementary platforms are needed: a knowledge platform, i.e., inter-connected contents and learning instruments as the base of the learning experience; and a technological platform, which makes the online learning experience possible by integrating contents and rendering them available to the community of learners.

Online learning provides learners with the opportunity to challenge their established knowledge and mindsets, and acquire, develop or strengthen new sets of knowledge, skills and competences. They can do so via the interaction with content-rich, digitally-built sets of learning activities and objects. Therefore, an online learning experience is characterised by high levels of interactivity with the interaction being afforded and mediated by digital technologies. Interactivity regards the vertical level of the learning process 42

under the control of the educator who selects a number of learning instruments with different levels of learner involvement; interaction regards the portion of the learning experience due to the horizontal sharing of knowledge and experiences among learners. Online learning offers proficient educators a variety of digitally enriched learning objects that potentially make the learning experience much more interactive than pure classroom-mediated ones. Moreover, online learning relies on learning platforms apt to connect many more learners than any physical classroom, making the learning process truly community based.

The combination of a digitally enriched learning experience and a community of learners is what makes ecosystems come into place. Nowadays, an educational institution which relies only on internally-developed content bears the risk of being systematically out of time or out of date, given the pace at which new knowledge is developed and

Special supplement | Edtech as a catalyst for the advancement of ecosystem-based management education | Giuseppe “Beppe” Soda and Gabriele Troilo

The combination of a digitally enriched learning experience and a community of learners is what makes ecosystems come into place. Nowadays, an educational institution which relies only on internallydeveloped content bears the risk of being systematically out of time or out of date, given the pace at which new knowledge is developed and made available publicly

made available publicly. Moreover, technological developments are not core competences of an educational institution, they can be in-sourced from external providers. Educational institutions face a strategic and inescapable choice: to play the role of orchestrator of online learning ecosystems or to become a unique and specialised party of ecosystems designed by other players.

The first strategic alternative implies that educational institutions acquire and develop new competences: scouting the landscape of EdTech start-ups providing advancements for the different services connected to the online learning experience; establishing strong relations with tech-based educational platforms able to provide access to the wider community of learners; integrating new technologies into their educational and operational processes.

The second strategic alternative implies a strong focus on the development of unique knowledge that can be of great appeal for educational platforms, together with a strong brand reputation management. Both options have their advantages and disadvantages in terms of their financial, operational and organisational implications.

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Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

Orchestrating online educational experiences Focusing on the first strategic alternative, we envision two technological developments that will be impactful regarding the decision how to orchestrate online educational experiences in the next future, they relate to the learning experience itself and the additional, communitybased services connected to the experience.

So far, the education industry has not played a leading role in embarking on the digital transformation of experiences it offered to its target customers. Other content industries – gaming, advertising, publishing – have set the pace by embedding digital evolutions in their offerings, thereby shaping their users’ expectations about the “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” of such experiences. Moreover, the same industries espoused a data-driven logic in their decisionmaking and launched several services able to leverage the huge amount of data generated through interactions with their communities, often in real time. As a result, content- and communitybased experiences in other industries had a defining influence on shaping students’ and executives’ high expectations of their online learning experiences.

Many EdTech start-ups are replete with young professionals whose competences have been forged in such industries. They are much more proficient than traditional business schools’ decision-makers at transforming technological and market insights into learning experiences that are born digitally and delivered online. The specialisation of such tech companies makes them a good counterpart to the broader competences of business schools in creating high quality educational content as long as schools are willing to pro-actively take on the role of orchestrators of ecosystems.

Many are the interrelated elements that define the online learning experience are going to be handled in an ecosystem logic. Admissions, the design of design of lifelong learning paths, testing and certifications, skill analysis and mapping, placement and career advising, are just some examples of schools’ activities that are increasingly unbundled through the creation of a network of 44

Special supplement | Edtech as a catalyst for the advancement of ecosystem-based management education | Giuseppe “Beppe” Soda and Gabriele Troilo

Researchers and practitioners have started discussing education as an ecosystem. The concept of ecosystem refers to a dynamic network of interconnection and interdependencies that connect different actors in which business schools can play the role of orchestrator. New services and streams of activities, from lifelong learning to coding boot-camps, have accelerated the unbundling of business schools through the creation of an ecosystem linking consolidated organisations and start-ups

specialised partners surrounding the traditional players of the education industry. Teaching and learning resources are being unbundled by becoming more granular, multifaceted, and multimodal and modular. Actors within the ecosystems could be extremely different compared to the traditional model. On top of this, the ecosystem has a “collective” intelligence that favours co-creation processes of new services and products.

However, as argued by McCowan (‘Higher education, unbundling, and the end of the university as we know it’. Oxford Review of Education, 43(6), 2017, 733-748), orchestrating an ecosystem of unbundled services may entail some worrying developments such as the removal of synergies between teaching and research and between different modes of learning. Although in a central position within the ecosystem, the price of flexibility will result in greater resource dependency from external partners in key functions of schools.

Beyond the financial and operational impact, this evolutionary process speaks to the identity of schools and universities. Does the role of orchestrator of an unbundled, flexible offer match with the cultural, social and institutional identity of educational institutions?

Conclusions Researchers and practitioners have started discussing education as an ecosystem. The concept of ecosystem refers to a dynamic network of interconnection and interdependencies that connect different actors in which business schools can play the role of orchestrator. New services and streams of activities, from lifelong learning to coding boot-camps, have accelerated the unbundling of business schools through the creation of an ecosystem linking consolidated organisations and start-ups. Because of this process, the experience offered to students and executives is being disrupted across many core processes, functions, and revenue streams. Along this emerging trend, COVID-19 has pushed schools and universities to reinvent themselves, to accommodate remote learning and to make the education ecosystem more complex and differentiated. In fact, the need for a fast and effective transition toward online delivery has offered EdTech firms an unexpected opportunity to both grow organically and become more embedded into the ecosystems of established business schools and universities.

About the authors Giuseppe “Beppe” Soda is Professor of Organization Theory and Network Analysis as well as Dean of SDA Bocconi School of Management. Before being appointed as Dean, he led the Research Division at SDA Bocconi School of Management and the Department of Management and Technology. His research focuses on network origins and dynamics, and on performance consequences of the interplay between organisational architectures and organisational networks. His work has been published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Organization, Academy of Management Annals, Journal of Management, Organization Studies, and Strategy Science.

Gabriele Troilo is Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean of Online Learning at SDA Bocconi School of Management. He was the Associate Dean of Open Market and New Business at the same School from 2017 to 2020. He was Vice President of European Marketing Academy from 2006 to 2012. Today he is a Fellow of the same association. His research interests are in strategic marketing, marketing organisation, big data marketing, creative industries.

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By Steven Poelmans, Bart Cambré, and Wouter Van Bockhave

Paradoxical Leadership: Coping with fluidity and complexity of ecosystems

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e live in a complex, rapidly changing world that constantly confronts us with new challenges. Governments, companies and social profit organisations are constantly looking for new solutions. Often, they do so from within the structures and with the methodologies that have proven their worth for decades. This is understandable. Why should what worked yesterday and led to good results, suddenly no longer work today? Established frameworks, such as the make, buy, or ally principles, are and will remain useful. In more and more situations, however, it is gradually becoming clear that “more of the same” no longer works. Some issues turn out to be so complex that a conclusive and effective answer can only come from an equally complex framework. For the challenge of “wicked” problems such as global warming, migration, fighting pandemics and poverty, we need to tap a different keg, a network keg and the perspective of an ecosystem. This constitutes another framework, and it marks the beginning of the “join”-era1.

Because knowledge and competences are spread out over different organisations, only the joint forces of otherwise independent organisations can work towards finding effective solutions to wicked problems. Solutions that would otherwise not be found.

Ecosystems The wicked problems faced by today’s leaders require mental models other than the ones that created them. Ecosystems provide a mental model attuned to the simultaneous needs for variety and alignment to tackle wicked problems in global networks. An ecosystem lens challenges conventional management wisdom by replacing simple, zero-sum oriented action principles with complex, co-opetitive and generally paradoxical ones. Even though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what an ecosystem is, amid a wilderness of viewpoints on an inherently complex concept, this article tries to draw implications for leadership by focusing on how common elements across ecosystems traditions challenge conventional leadership wisdom. These challenges require business schools to equip leaders with new mental models.

In line with ecosystems’ open, yet functionally bounded scope2, their interdependent yet adaptive co-evolution3, their emergently distributed yet intentionally market-centric self-organisation4, and their cross-sectorally diverse, yet externalityreducing reach5, we offer the following nonexhaustive definition of an ecosystem as: An open but self-contained, functional multistakeholder system of interacting and co-evolving actors and institutions, characterised by a mesospecific goal-directedness and partial formalisation.

Leadership in ecosystems faces specific challenges as it implies mobilising others to act in the ecosystem’s interest. Ecosystems’

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partial formalisation6 implies that leaders need to motivate others who are not contractually bound to follow. This calls for trust-building, by being empathic and fair to create goodwill, and by formulating a shared vision that engenders a deep meaning and direction. The neutrality required for trustworthiness in turn conflicts with the expected drive for fast results, as quick wins provide social proof to mobilise ecosystem followers. Ecosystem leadership is most relevant when entire industries or regions need to be mobilised to face wicked challenges.

To achieve critical mass, leaders are required to support an innovative coalition of the willing, without aggrieving the late majority and to be patient for returns, but impatient for tangible project results.

Their legitimacy derives from their ability to broker exchanges and empower others to take initiative. Such servant leadership is paradoxically the indirect way to push others for aligned collective action, learning and purpose-driven development in the ecosystem. Ecosystems cannot be “pushed”, but rather effectuated by “setting a rhythm” for the ecosystem to let a shared interest, commitment and results grow from interactions between members. Moreover, the leadership role in complex systems is polycentric and distributed across self-organising subsystem hubs. As such, ecosystem leadership involves complex goal-setting with no authority and mere partial reach, unpacking goals into simple action rules to nonetheless stimulate local initiative, all while aligning with initiatives across subsystems.

Enacting as “one” in this way is, furthermore, set in an ecosystem, whose composition, context and one’s own role in it is in constant flux.

For leaders at business schools, we argue that the challenge is even more profound. As knowledge hubs and leadership beacons in the ecosystems around them, they have a responsibility to prepare their own organisation, as well as the ecosystem, for the new realities ahead. Their role is that of the ideal-typical ecosystem leader who enacts the required mindset and practices for other hub leaders to follow, signposting the transformations needed and reporting on the ecosystem’s current state. They are the chairmen of the virtual, 48

Ecosystem leadership involves complex goal-setting with no authority and mere partial reach, unpacking goals into simple action rules to nonetheless stimulate local initiative, all while aligning with initiatives across subsystems distributed board that sets the ecosystem’s direction and designs its governance without formal authority to do so, nor with any of the other formal governance levers that boards typically possess. As such, business school leaders must become masters of paradox, embracing the simultaneous yet paradoxical needs for emergence and intentionality, for direction and distributed initiative, and for increasing connectedness and interdependency while remaining adaptive.

Leadership Paradoxes In order to meet the complexity and multiple paradoxes characterising their context (see table 1 p52), leaders of ecosystems will need to reflect this complexity in themselves and develop paradoxical leadership.

Based on research in the NeuroTrainingLab™ we have proposed a theoretical framework of paradoxical leadership behaviours7. Everything starts with “integral leadership complexity”, the interaction and integration of cognitive, emotional, and social-cultural complexity in the individual.

Special supplement | Paradoxical Leadership | Steven Poelmans, Bart Cambré, and Wouter Van Bockhave

Competition

Cooperation

Autonomous, open, distributed agency

Interdependent agency

Short Term Drive for Results

Long term Vision transcending organisations

Organisational benefits

Shared benefits of the ecosystem

Strong Initiative to create an ecosystem

Distributed leadership to maintain an ecosystem

Intentionality

Emergence

Context as constraint

Context as enabler

Table 1: Paradoxes of Leadership in Ecosystems

Self-centeredness

Other-centeredness

Keeping distance and perspective

Seeking closeness and connection

Uniformity in application of policies, rules

Individualisation of solutions

Enforcing work requirements

Allowing flexibility

Keeping control

Delegating autonomy

Informing, persuading

Inquiring, listening

Task-Orientation

Relation-Orientation

Focus of Exploitation

Focus on Exploration

Table 2: Paradoxical Leadership Behaviours in Ecosystems

This is a necessary condition to develop behavioural complexity, function of one’s behavioural “library” or “repertoire” of accumulated, visceral, first-hand experiences, scripts and protocols of how to actually deal with situations that require simultaneous and contradictory approaches and how to respond to a host of ambiguous and contradictory forces, including the simultaneous presence of opposites. Effective leaders can draw from a broader repertoire of potentially conflicting leadership behaviour than less effective managers. Behavioural complexity will, in turn, determine the level of competency of the person in balancing multiple paradoxical behaviours, which will co-determine leadership effectiveness, both in terms of getting results and building trust. We can distinguish eight dimensions of paradoxical leadership behaviours (see table 2).

Switching between paradoxical leadership behaviours requires cognitive ability, flexibility and self-regulation, all needed for balancing the paradoxes; to be calm and mindful to take perspective and consider the different sides of

multiple paradoxes, and switch between different poles of paradoxes just at the right time. These are all executive functions, run by the resourceintensive pre-frontal cortex. This means that self-regulation is much needed, but also costly, as it can result in loss of time, energy resources, fatigue and stress. This explains why managers can run out of fuel quickly and fall back on automatisms to save resources, getting stuck in one leadership style, the one that is most familiar and easy to execute.

Implications for research & practice As extant research on ecosystem leadership is predominantly conceptual and lacking synthesis, opportunities for future research are vast. Given the complexity of the ecosystem concept, it remains an elusive phenomenon, with each new advance still raising more questions than it answers. To avoid remaining stuck in purely academic definitional explorations, researchers are invited to delve into the messy and dynamic context of ecosystems with a phenomenological lens to identify 49

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complex ecosystem leadership dynamics. The best way to do so for business schools, as bridges between scientific discovery and wise business practice, is to engage in performative ecosystem research projects enacting the ecosystems around them for the wicked problems affecting them and the future markets embedded within those problems8.

From a more traditional stakeholder perspective, a business school should (and will) focus on the alumni community, the university, fundraisers, future students, faculty, governments and companies. However, much more is needed from a contemporary network perspective when value propositions can and will be formulated at the network level. None of the participating stakeholders can achieve these alone, but together they can. Business schools therefore need to shift from an ego-perspective (with themselves in a central position) towards a network perspective in which they participate as a necessary but insufficient partner to obtain answers for wicked problems that no single organisation can obtain.

A business school’s unique knowledge contribution, bridging academic rigour with practical relevance, will then be key to face challenges that require collaboration, not competition.

Conclusions To conclude, we need a radical mind shift and the necessary development of integral complexity and paradoxical leadership in agents of ecosystems in order for them to meet the challenge. Business schools can contribute to the development of ecosystems in many ways, of course by taking the lead in building bridges between multiple stakeholders in society, but also by developing integral complexity and paradoxical leadership in students, in order to help them develop the required mindset and exacted leadership competencies to build and participate in ecosystems themselves.

Collaborating in complex ecosystems may well be the only way to address some of “wicked”, enormously complex, and in many cases existential challenges that our contemporary society faces.

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References

1. Kenis, P., Cambré, B. (2019). Organisatienetwerken.

Pelckmans Pro. 2. A dner, R., ‘Ecosystem as Structure: An Actionable Construct for Strategy’. Journal of Management, 2017. 43(1): p. 39-58.

3. I ansiti, M. and R. Levien, ‘Strategy as ecology’. Harvard Business Review, 2004. 82(3): p. 68-+.

4. Autio, E. and L. Thomas, ‘Innovation ecosystems’. The Oxford handbook of innovation management, 2014: p. 204-288.

5. D attee, B., O. Alexy, and E. Autio, ‘Maneuvering in Poor Visibility: How Firms Play the Ecosystem Game When Uncertainty Is High’. Academy of Management Journal, 2018. 61(2): p. 466-498.

6. A hrne, G. and N. Brunsson, ‘Organization outside organizations: the significance of partial organization’.

Organization, 2011. 18(1): p. 83-104. oelmans, S.A.Y. (2020). Paradoxes of Leadership.

7. P Neuroscience-based Leadership for the Information Age. Pelckmans Publishers.

8. S imanis, E. and S. Hart, ‘Innovation From The Inside Out’.

Mit Sloan Management Review, 2009. 50(4): p. 77-86.

About the authors Dr. Steven Poelmans is Professor of Neuromanagement & Strategic Leadership at Antwerp Management School and the Faculty of Business & Economics, University of Antwerp, and Melexis Chair of High Performance Organizations.

Bart Cambré is Vice Dean of Antwerp Management School and professor of Business Research Methods at Antwerp Management School, the University of Antwerp and MCI (Austria).

Wouter Van Bockhaven is Professor of ecosystem strategy at Antwerp Management School’s smart ecosystems expertise cluster. His research focuses on strategies to develop innovation networks to tackle institutional and social barriers preventing ‘shared value creation’. He is co-founder of TalentLogiQs™, developer of evidence-based talent development assessments.

EFMD Global Focus_Iss.02 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

By Ulrich Hommel and Sarah Vaughan

Managing Quality in Education Ecosystems: The emerging challenges

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Special supplement | Managing Quality in Education Ecosystems: The emerging challenges | Ulrich Hommel and Sarah Vaughan

Through a holistic approach suggested by ecosystems, business schools can leverage their strengths, spread risk and investment by establishing new relationships across business, academia, the public policy sphere, and broader society

E

cosystems as a Game Changer The emergence of multi-institution education ecosystems must be seen as a radical game-changer which has developed as a response to the exhaustion and shift in purpose of the existing educational paradigm in the context of twenty-first century connectivity and the increasing erosion of resources for public education. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), as skills creators (providing learners around the globe with both the technical business skills and the soft skills of management), “credentialers” and idea laboratories, are challenging and transforming the traditional, conservative, top-down educational hierarchies.

Through a holistic approach suggested by ecosystems, business schools can leverage their strengths, spread risk and investment by establishing new relationships across business, academia, the public policy sphere, and broader society. In the process, they are able to advance their transformation with better reach to ecosystem partners at the local, national and global level. Such creative disruption results in new frameworks and organisational paradigms for inclusive education and lifelong learning. It will encourage the emergence of learner-driven experiences, flexible delivery methods, economies of scale thanks to the use of technology, and innovative credentialing systems that can replace or supplement conventional assessment practices.

Three perspectives on ecosystems Sharing resources and control of the different dimensions of their mission – teaching, research and outreach – can result in three types of ecosystem: . Knowledge-sharing ecosystems comprising 1 complex, evolving networks of organisations including think tanks, foundations, governmental and global agencies connecting to build a global shared knowledge base (about education and learning, innovation, funding opportunities, scaling innovation) to develop opportunities not only within but between networks (see also Wu and Lei p34 in this volume). . Innovation ecosystems to accelerate 2 radical innovation through the combination of multiple players, policies and platforms.

These innovation ecosystems tend to contain traditional and new education providers, formal and informal learning opportunities, the involvement of business, Edtech developers and providers and HEIs, often supported by digital technology (see also Soda and Troilo p40 in this volume).

3. Learning ecosystems comprising diverse combinations of providers (schools, businesses, community organisations as well as government agencies) to create new learning opportunities and pathways.

They are usually supported by an innovative credentialing systems or technology platforms.

This shift across the different types of ecosystems has initiated significant changes in the ways HEIs operate, providing exciting times for quality assurance (QA) professionals, practices and providers. We aim to explore the inherent challenges in redesigning QA practices in these cross-function, cross-institution or cross-sector operations.

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EFMD Global Focus_Iss.02 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

Strategy, risk and QA Leadership A higher education ecosystem is a selfregulating and fluid network of players with a common focus on value-co-creation. Its establishment can imply enormous complexities in terms of coordinating people, capital and technology. When thinking of an ecosystem as a collaborative model, there is a need for a common understanding of its strategy, vision, framework, values, culture, and each member’s contribution to align and achieve QA objectives in a seamless manner. Trust and credibility of partners in this key journey of change are paramount to how quality assurance can be delivered.

The design of a new quality assurance model, including appropriate metrics and KPIs, is an integral part of the strategy and leadership, and should be established right from the start. Like all transformation initiatives, organisations will need to absorb the change and management and staff must clearly understand their roles and responsibilities in ensuring continual quality delivery whilst managing the cultural shift.

A fundamental strategic question is that of the governance and leadership of QA within the ecosystem identifying where the overall responsibility and processes reside. Two approaches exist: a centralised model (already in existence for networks or consortium degrees which have a leading institution) or a shared responsibility model across partners federating their QA processes and teams.

The collaborative model requires balancing the tension of two types of risk: the risk of poor-quality provision vs. the risk of stifling innovation. It requires a dynamic systems approach to risk assessment and strategy – to identify and mitigate strategy risks, external risks, and even novel risks – to understand the dynamics over time, and provide advanced risk assessment tools to support multi-criteria decision-making. Due diligence mechanisms are even more critical to make sure the motives, goals, and integrity are aligned, rather than rushing after a “quick fix” or immediate revenue or endowment stream. Processes to manage and, if necessary, separate from dysfunctional members are of key importance as well.

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When thinking of an ecosystem as a collaborative model, there is a need for a common understanding of its strategy, vision, framework, values, culture, and each member’s contribution to align and achieve QA objectives in a seamless manner. Trust and credibility of partners in this key journey of change are paramount to how quality assurance can be delivered

Special supplement | Managing Quality in Education Ecosystems: The emerging challenges | Ulrich Hommel and Sarah Vaughan

In order to respond to the constant pressures ever more quickly and adopt emerging technology faster, QA teams must apply an “end-to-end” approach for the learning journey as a whole rather than the traditional piecemeal approach

QA and technology platforms and tools Technology platforms and cloud-based systems serve to choreograph and automate the mutualised learning resources of ecosystem players.

Architectural design and distributed governance of learning infrastructure must ensure proper deployment and sharing to support the diverse learning journeys of students within the ecosystem as well as other forms of shared value creation.

QA professionals will need to take a front seat role and be engaged earlier to build quality-enhancing features into educational design and delivery practices. They will also need to chaperone a shift away from a quality assurance ideology based on the philosophy of inspection to one that focuses on set-up and system integrity checks.

The high compositionality of services is fundamental for both structuring and controlling quality assurance processes. Growing and changing expectations of students around the ease of access and engagement call for an integrative view of quality management that combines the consumer view and the technical view of the service delivered. Support tools are no longer limited to commercial off-the-shelf tools and increasingly include open-source alternatives that can all be aligned like Lego blocks on a platform. Technological innovation must be increasingly matched by schools with sizable resource commitments, but this is not the only dimension where investments is required.

QA and the learning experience Heightened customer expectations regarding the broader learning experience and the careerspecific value-added, call for the seamless delivery of well-connected learning interventions as students travel on their individual learning trajectories through the ecosystem. At the start, this necessitates the amalgamation of user experience design and instructional design, driven by a design thinking logic. Maintaining consistency of standards is another challenge when rolling out the distributed delivery model with diverse sets of providers and learners.

In order to respond to the constant pressures ever more quickly and adopt emerging technology faster, QA teams must apply an “end-to-end” approach for the learning journey as a whole rather than the traditional piecemeal approach. They must focus on student-centric learning outcomes that cover both formal and informal learning scenarios co-created by host institutions in the ecosystem with the support of third-party ed-tech providers.

Quality indicators, traditionally expressed as one-dimensional proxy measure such as contact hours or credit hours, will need to evolve as a single, centrally designed set of rules will no longer describe the full breadth of the learning experience. Stringent criteria capturing the accumulation of experiences across a range of institutions and modalities for transferring credits for a degree award must form the basis of ensuring qualityand enforcing achievement standards as they replace or augment the traditional linear system of examinations and graduation in the same institution.

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EFMD Global Focus_Iss.02 Vol.15 www.globalfocusmagazine.com

Business Schools + Ecosystems = ?

These are exciting times. The eco-systemic way of working across sectors and stakeholder groups will create deep and lasting changes to the organisation of learning and its alignment with the needs of business and society as a whole QA and learning analytics As learning pathways become more flexible and personalised, the curricular footprint of a degree programme is more difficult to grasp ex ante. In this context, with the help of advanced data analytics capabilities, faculty advisors and mentors must leverage actionable dashboard data to provide students with targeted guidance on how to build their learning pathways incrementally while keeping their overarching career ambitions in mind.

In traditional systems, it is typically the needs of the organisation, not the needs of the learner, that inform the design and the requirements of a learning system. Learners’ intellectual progression is treated as an implied outcome of, on the one hand, quality-assured module content, pedagogy and assessment and, on the other hand, pre-approved module sequencing.

Within ecosystems, curricula are more flexible and fluid requiring QA to become more learner centred. Better learner-produced data, beyond end-of-course evaluations and student experience survey data, will assist HEIs to develop insights on students’ attainment of skills, their learning outcomes, and graduate satisfaction levels. Gaining information on the pace of student learning, the content they choose to engage with, and the reasons for students not completing a specific learning intervention, will become foundational components of QA. Data collection and monitoring the quality of data generation processes will represent formidable challenges within an ecosystem environment.

Getting the metrics right from the start is vital, as is ongoing validation by QA teams on performance requirements and changes over time. However, given the stronger data privacy and protection laws, the QA data collection processes put in place must safeguard data and include a robust and secure system for the integration and sharing of data across and amongst the ecosystem partners.

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Agile QA executives needed These are exciting times. The eco-systemic way of working across sectors and stakeholder groups will create deep and lasting changes to the organisation of learning and its alignment with the needs of business and society as a whole. It paves the way to a greater diversity of growth opportunities (programme development, revenue generation, and knowledge creation), agile governance structures and, ideally, greater resilience to unanticipated shifts or shocks.

This new paradigm of adaptability and scalability requires agile leadership of QA departments as well.

QA work has to move away from the enforcement of bureaucratic rules that often emphasise process over outcomes and, instead, must assume the role of driver of innovation and ecosystem success within the HEI. This identity shift will put QA executives at the forefront of balancing control and arm’s-length management of shared value chains.

QA leaders need to be consistent and stability-enhancing in their actions and, at the same time, be ready to disrupt in order to take advantage of the dynamically evolving business opportunities within the ecosystem. New skillsets will be required to match this identity shift, implying a fundamental rethink of how the expanding competencies required for QA work can most effectively be developed going forward.

About the authors Ulrich Hommel is Managing Director of XOLAS, a business school consultancy, Professor of Finance at EBS University of Business & Law, Germany, and Director of the EFMD Quality Assurance Academy.

Sarah Vaughan is Associate Dean Quality & Accreditations at ICN Business School, France and one of the most experienced quality assurance leaders in the business school sector globally; she has been involved in accreditation processes of international (AACSB, EFMD) and French bodies for more than 30 years.

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