Orchestrating
Transformative Student Experiences – Students gain much
from business school, but especially value the major transformative
experiences: increased knowledge, new
outlooks on personal career and business possibilities, inspirational faculty,
and personal and professional contacts with peers. The Core courses are crucial fundamentals, providing a common
integrative experience and raising the shared baseline of knowledge, but the
Electives are the essential differentiators, those courses which allow students
to discover and pursue interests in depth, often in projects and on teams where
the so-called “soft-skills” are not merely talked about, put practiced and
perfected. Orchestrating such
experiences is MIT’s essential task as an innovation education institution.
Our
“Technology Business” Vision – MIT Sloan is – or
could legitimately claim to be – the World’s Premier Technology Business
School, since our curricular offerings reinforce and complement MIT’s
science, technology, and applied arts to a much greater extent than any of our
erstwhile peer schools. Indeed, instead
of competing against other business schools on their turf and by their
standards, MIT Sloan’s top specialties are innovation-oriented: strategy means technology strategy,
organizational analysis means system dynamics, finance
means financial engineering, entrepreneurship means high tech
ventures, marketing means innovative product marketing, and
so on. Technology Business is our real
strength and key competitive advantage: difficult for others to replicate, and yet
of deep and enduring importance to economic growth and human progress.
Embracing “Hard” MIT
Fundamentals – At our best, MIT Sloan lives up to MIT’s “hard”
reputation, emphasizing
strategic savvy, a dynamic systems outlook, logical rigor, and quantitative
analysis. Furthermore, we are best
positioned to concentrate on emerging technologies, high potential technology
ventures, and effective links with inventors and innovators. Regardless of short-term dot-booms or
dot-busts, these are enduring principles and values. To further these values and accomplish our overarching vision,
MIT Sloan ought to be admitting the most promising prospective talent,
maximally transforming students for the better while at MIT, and ultimately
graduating masters of these fundamentals who go on to pioneer emerging
technology business domains.
Electives Critical but
Relatively Neglected – Performance in chosen electives is perhaps
the most powerful source of professional inspiration as well as lead-indicator
of future success. At our best, MIT
Sloan electives are outstanding.
Faculty from tech strategy, system dynamics, and other largely elective
course consistently get top teaching marks and awards. And yet, at our worst, the elective
offerings at MIT Sloan have been relatively ill-strategized with respect to our
larger institutional vision, too often haphazardly organized, ill-coordinated
with one another, largely disconnected from the rest of MIT, and, generally,
far too relegated to chance and/or the unpredictable enthusiasm of Track
faculty and steering committees.
Major Challenges to
Consider – Many things, therefore, could and should be
systematically addressed in considering and ultimately improving MIT Sloan’s
curricular offerings. Among the most
dramatic challenges – and, correspondingly, of greatest strategic import – are:
·
Sloan’s Disconnection from Rest of MIT
– Despite official propaganda and pre-admission perception, MIT Sloan is
largely isolated from the rest of the Institute, physically, intellectually,
academically, and socially. This
situation is changing with new classes and cross-campus social initiatives such
as TechLink, but much remains to be done.
·
Insufficiency of Tracks
Alone – Professional tracks help guide student interest, but they seem
mostly to serve as forced prerequisites for in-demand seminars and classes
rather than an essential framework helping build student communities of
interest. As one wag puts it, the only
track any self-respecting student ought to take is the self-managed one.
·
Neglected “Soft Skills” –
Although our principal strengths are indeed technological and “hard”, all too
often MIT and MIT Sloan neglect crucial “soft skills”: negotiation, sales,
interpersonal effectiveness, introspection, leadership, and other intangible
essentials of success in society.
·
Poor Sequencing of Classes & Excessive
Overlap – Too rarely do classes seamlessly build on one
another and, correspondingly, all too frequently do they repeat and overlap in
major ways. There is substantial
overhead to coordination, so it’s easy to let that slip. Sometimes internecine rivalries dominate or
courses are imagined to be more unique and different than they really are. But mostly the overlap and poor sequencing
results from simply not paying attention or not planning.
·
Faculty Disincentives to Change –
MIT faculty are principally motivated by their individual research agendas,
fundraising, and outside professional and personal activities, and thus shy
away from any likely distractions and additional, non-research
commitments. And yet most curricular
reform or transformation is likely to require new or additional course
development work, i.e. faculty time.
Therefore, it is very tough to get new or additional courses beyond
their current MIT commitment.
Nevertheless, it does happen when faculty are inspired to grapple with
an emerging domain, especially when it may help shape and enrich a new vein of
their research, or when an unusually large pot of money serves as lucre extraordinaire.
·
Legitimate Suspicion of Curricular Fads
– From a faculty perspective, the eBusiness curriculum emerged very quickly in
reaction to student interest and demand…only to be ramped up just in time for
the dot-demise. Similarly, the
entrepreneurship curriculum was expanded just by the time interest waned. Ditto possibly for the Negotiations
offerings. Faculty are leery of student
demand-driven change, and generally perceive such forces as fads.
·
Undue Restrictions on Student Workload –
Blanket credit limitations on MIT Sloan student curricular interests cure
symptoms exhibited by an unfortunate narrow fraction of students, those who
overload to the point of asocial unreason.
And yet such restrictions kill broad student incentive to experiment, try
new things, take courses beyond the minimum requirements, and branch out to the
rest of MIT.
·
Strategizing from One Crisis to the Next –
Too frequently both the MIT Sloan and MIT faculty and administration appear to
lurch from one crisis to another, firefighting local problems on an ad hoc
basis instead of strategizing and acting in accord with deeper principles and
an overarching vision.
·
Everyday Actions Disconnected from
Overarching Vision – In summary, people generally have a
difficult time strategizing, i.e. connecting everyday actions to overarching
vision, and vice-versa, when given an overarching vision, deciding which of
myriad alternatives is most worthy and compelling.
3. Specific Elective
Opportunities
Many Possible Elective
Transformations – Several potential changes and
improvements could really sharpen MIT Sloan’s curricular offerings and help us
connect better with the rest of the Institute.
Example transformations include:
·
Embracing the Technology Business Vision
-- MIT Sloan is uniquely positioned among peer institutions to dominate the
broad and important Technology Business sector. Currently we do this in an ad hoc fashion, almost apologetically,
implying that being “business generalists” would be better. And yet new technology – in all its forms,
from software through hardware, financial through social, ideas through
products – is the principal source of Solovian economic growth – i.e. the part
that counts most.
·
Moving Beyond Tracks
– The track mechanism allows both logical curricular combinations and students
with similar interests to act in concert.
But the mechanism is limited in scope and ignorant of broad goals,
personal interests, and technological subtleties. For example, we want all students to be entrepreneurial, not
merely NPVD tracksters. Similarly,
every alumnus should be emerging technology literate, not merely those from
some new “Technology Track”.
·
Key Technologist Links
– Social links to rest of MIT are too often an extracurricular accident. Happy examples include the connection
between co-founders of Akamai, InterSense, and SensAble Technologies, but these
are exceptions, not the rule. As a
minimum, promising technology students should be recruited into classes and
even programs at MIT Sloan, whether MBA or the more specialized MOT, LFM, SDM,
and more. This would be as much to
benefit those technologist students as the MIT Sloan students.
·
Survey & Sampler Speaker Series
– There are currently no survey classes, either Highlights of the Best
of MIT Technology or Sampling the Best of Sloan. And yet, being easy to run and promote while
enjoying broad student appeal, such a big-picture speaker series would go a
long way towards connecting the disparate parts of campus.
·
Focused Quasicurricular Research
– Participation in graduate research endeavors such as Professor Charlie Fine’s
potential Technology Roadmaps Project or Professor Diane Burton’s
potential Emerging Companies Project would offer MIT Sloan students an
integrative research focus for their time at MIT.
·
Extracurricular Connections
– Potentially powerful curricular connections to extracurriculars have
historically been ignored, with the notable exception of the entrepreneurship
sector where the student-run MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition is tightly
linked with courses. Let’s learn from
that domain and generalize.
·
Orchestrating Serendipity
– Serendipitous connections between students are an essential transformative
social experience at business schools.
We should optimize our orchestration of cross-campus student connections
between those who really ought to know one another. Such orchestration might well be through curricular,
extracurricular, and other means, but needs to be explicitly considered rather
than relegated to chance.
·
Integration with MIT-wide
Emerging Technology Themes – MIT is principally about discovering,
inventing, and diffusing emerging technologies into the world at large. MIT Sloan should play a key and ever deeper
role in this core mission, concentrating especially on the challenges of
commercialization.
4. MIT’s Emerging
Technology Strategy
The Business Implications
of Emerging Technologies – Towards greater MIT-wide connection, MIT
Sloan might more tightly complement the rest of the Institute. Indeed, the rest of MIT – especially the
Engineering School – is investing heavily in at least five major strategic
emerging innovation sectors: Tiny,
Info, Bio, Complex, and Developmental Technologies. MIT Sloan alumni could – and should – end up
playing key roles in the development and commercialization of these blossoming
realms, and, therefore, our classes should maximally prepare our current
students towards such a future. Let us
interweave – throughout admissions, the Core, MBA tracks, Electives, Executive
Education offerings, and extracurricular activities – these themes:
(1) Tiny
Technologies – Materials, devices, & manufacturing,
ranging from the very-nano to the ultra-macro in scale;
(2) Information
Technologies – Computation, communication, &
content, from the infinitely replicable to the ultra-complex;
(3) Biomedical
Technologies – Bioengineering & applied life
sciences, from biomolecular engineering through systemic neurotechnology;
(4) Complex
Systems Technologies – Huge, distributed, non-linear and/or
otherwise complicated challenges, from societal infrastructure through
environmental systems;
(5) Developmental
Technologies – Techniques & methods for accelerating
global technological, economic, and cultural progress throughout poor,
developing nations worldwide.
5. Case Elective
Illustrations
New or Rethought
Electives – On balance, changing the suite of elective
offerings at MIT Sloan is a tricky proposition, one requiring concerted
grass-roots, faculty, and Institute leader-level action. A handful of case examples may serve to
illustrate and clarify both the grand opportunity and the underlying
difficulties:
·
Historical – MIT $50K Entrepreneurship
Competition – Beyond over 60 companies and ~$10 Billion
in firm valuation, MIT’s decade-old Competition has catalyzed the creation of a
half-dozen credit-bearing MIT courses and continues to push MIT to better cater
to entrepreneurial student interests.
And yet such classes may not endure even with intense student
interest. For example, 15.830 MIT
Technologies with New Venture Potential is in the MIT Course Catalog but is
not offered, supposedly for lack of interested and available faculty.
·
Current – 15.968/MAS.968/HBS1286
Technology & Competitive Strategy – The first-ever
joint MIT-Harvard technology business strategy class is pioneering a “genetic
cross” between traditional versions of 15.390 New Enterprises and 15.901
Technology Strategy along with injecting an intense survey of emerging
technologies. The class totals over 80
students, including roughly half from a dozen different science and engineering
departments at MIT, and similar numbers from the business side. The resulting projects are serious: real innovations in each of the five MIT
strategic technology sectors with potential for real consequences and real
impact on real people.
·
Potential – Developmental Innovations
– The prospect of accelerating economic, technological, and cultural growth in
developing nations ought to inspire myriad new MIT courses, connections,
projects, and other MIT mechanisms for change.
The impoverished and backwards three-quarters of humanity must be
embraced by the first world as soon as possible. The Institute is in a position to create or combine key class
offerings and play a leadership role in encouraging student focus towards this
end, but currently things are missing or scattered throughout MIT.