By Beatriz Marie D. Cruz, Reporter
MADRID — Business schools must embrace the concept of “strategic foresight” in their teaching to help future executives navigate constant economic and technological disruption, an academic said.
“We think that being able to navigate, understand, and make decisions in an increasingly complex world is becoming more and more important for business students,” IE Business School Dean Lee Newman told BusinessWorld on the sidelines of the South Summit Madrid earlier this month.
Strategic foresight teaches future leaders the ability to analyze and explore possible futures to help their organizations prepare for change.
“The first step is to identify the forces of disruption that business people should take into account,” he said. “Then you have to give students the tools to analyze these forces of disruption, to understand them, and to make sound decisions.”
“You need to learn things like understanding (the impact of) geopolitics, economic shocks, as well as health, tech, and war on your supply chain,” Mr. Newman said.
About 69% of chief executive officers in the Philippines believe that their businesses will only remain economically viable for as long as 10 years if they continue on their current path, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) 28th Global CEO Survey.
This metric reflected business leaders’ concerns over tech disruption, changing consumer preferences, and heightened competition, it said.
According to Mr. Newman, today’s business school curricula must teach future executives how to manage both humans and tech as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to disrupt work.
“Managers need to know not just how to orchestrate work, but they need to understand technology well enough to know what tech to hire on the team,” he said.
Madrid’s IE University offers a specialized course, “AI for Productivity,” which teaches undergraduate and post-graduate students the proper use of AI for market research, writing, and brainstorming.
“We’re starting to now push and embed different types of AI tools into different parts of our education based on the type of business function that the person is studying in a class or in a program,” Mr. Newman said.
According to the PwC survey, 88% of business leaders expect moderate to large AI integration in their business processes, workflows and technology platforms in the next three years.
However, students have been using AI to cheat on their tests, posing a significant challenge among traditional schools globally, Mr. Newman said.
As such, business schools must revamp how they assess students to focus on project-based learning, he said.
“Students like real projects and they like exposure to the company and the mentors, which helps them get jobs,” Mr. Newman said.
“(For example,) maybe a Philippine company wants to expand to the Singapore market… so the students have to do the project… And if this project team delivers… they get a better grade,” he noted.
Co-organized by IE University, the South Summit Madrid is an annual global conference on innovation and entrepreneurship. Its 14th Edition was held between June 4 and 6 in Madrid.