Alice Stewart has spent the past year working with colleagues to develop a proposal for an MBA program at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a process that got her thinking about ways business education could be transformed. As a professor of strategic management, she had observed that business students coming into her classroom might become more effective managers if they had a better grasp of more specialized knowledge, such as engineering or biotechnology, when they get into the workforce.
When she learned that the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) was holding a contest asking for ideas to improve management education, she jotted some musings on paper. She envisioned professors from different disciplines creating micro-curriculums, where they'd weave content together from business education, engineering, and the sciences. Students who completed the classes, which she dubbed "stackable knowledge units," would get a certificate. Eventually, they could combine these certificates to earn a business degree, she wrote in her proposal, thereby allowing students to customize their education track.
"We are trapped by the concept of a degree and the concept of a curriculum," Stewart said. "There needs to be a rethinking of what it is we are supposed to be doing in higher education."
Stewart's bold idea has had a big payoff. Today she learned she is the first-place winner of GMAC's Ideas to Innovation contest and will be receiving the top cash prize of $50,000. Hers was one of 20 winning entries from professors, students, and executives who will share the $262,500 in prizes that the Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), set aside for the contest.
The testing organization launched the contest in July, asking people to submit a one-page summary of an idea they believed had the potential to improve management education. GMAC's Management Education for Tomorrow (MET) Fund, a $10 million fund that seeks to improve business education globally, is overseeing the contest and providing funding. It is the first time that GMAC has launched such a contest and the organization decided to open it to anyone around the world who had a suggestion, whether he or she was involved in the management education world or not, says Dave Wilson, president and chief executive officer of GMAC.
"There have been lots of blue-ribbon commissions and studies of management education that have come out and talked about the future of management education, but what we realized is every one of those things pretty much brings together the same minds who have thought about it before," says Wilson. "This contest opened up the idea phase to absolutely anyone. Even a taxi driver could make a submission."
GMAC may not have received submissions from taxi drivers, but the contest did get an overwhelming response that exceeded GMAC's expectations. By the submission deadline in the fall, GMAC had received more than 650 entries from 60 countries around the world, including India, China, the U.K., Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, Wilson says. Of the ideas, 57 percent came from students, alumni, and prospective students, while 11 percent were from faculty and school staff.
So what made Stewart's idea stand out from the pack? Allen Brandt, director of the GMAC MET Fund, calls it "a very interesting way of taking something that exists in a school and repackaging it in a new way that no one has thought of." Says Brandt: "This is essentially building your own degree based on creating stackable units. It is something that is different enough and could help you, as an individual student, in approaching a program in the way you want to do it without a wholesale change to the existing way a school is working."
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