Boston University’s Business Education Jam and Other MBA News Snippets

Get on down and jam with Boston University School of Management and IBM

Boston University School of Management and IBM are holding a free three-day online discussion over the future of business education next week, starting September 30.

Participants can exchange ideas and learn from executives, researchers, scholars, students, and stakeholders from across the globe in a total of 10 forum discussions.

Forums each have a target audience in mind but are open to all, and range from ‘Fostering Ethical Leadership’ to ‘Cultivating Research with Impact’.

The Boston University School of Management and IBM Business Education Jam will be led by an array of business education specialists who have signed up to host or be involved in particular segments.

These guests include a number of business school faculty members such as the deans of Haas School of Business, MIT Sloan and the Indian Business School as well as renowned professors such as Harvard’s Clayton Christensen and Dartmouth Tuck’s Vijay Govindarajan who have popularized the concepts of disruptive innovation and reverse innovation respectively.

Representatives from key employers of MBA graduates, such as PwC, Ernst & Young, Coca-Cola and CISCO, are also taking part.

After the jam, IBM will analyze every word in every discussion to make recommendations, backed up by survey results, for both businesses and providers of business education.

Open University MBA celebrates 25 years with scholarship

The Open University MBA is celebrating its 25th year with the launch of a new scholarship.

Described as a pioneer in distance learning by the BBC, the Open University was recently revealed to be the third most-searched university by Google users worldwide in 2014, ahead of luminaries such as Stanford, LSE and Harvard and underlining students’ interest in online study.

The scholarship on offer will cover the first year of the Open University MBA and will be awarded to an individual under the age of 32 selected as a future leader of great potential in an essay-based competition.

The Open University MBA features among the top 20 in this year’s QS Distance/Online MBA Ranking.

China’s hospitality industry at heart of CEIBS and Cornell partnership

The expanding needs of China’s hospitality industry lies at the heart of a new dual degree offered by Shanghai’s CEIBS (China Europe International Business School) and Ithaca's Cornell University.

The two-year degree will combine a CEIBS MBA with the Master of Management in Hospitality (MMH) program at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration.

Heading up the development of the new program was Cornell University’s Rohit Verma who explained its reasoning in a press release:

“By offering a dual degree with CEIBS, we can continue to enhance the global presence of the MMH degree and attract some of China's most talented business students to the program.”

The MBA-MMH will aspire to provide participants with a well-rounded management education suited to the needs of the hospitality industry and to China’s cultural context, taking in courses from operations management to properties development. There will also be an opportunity to undertake a summer internship in the hospitality industry to gain hands-on experience.  

“An understanding of the way business is done in China, within a global context, is now an invaluable asset—as it will be for years to come—and the country's service industry is becoming increasingly important,” said Hellmut Schutte, CEIBS dean.

The first intake of students, due for fall 2015, will spend one year at both CEIBS and Cornell University and can choose where to being their studies.