GBSB Global Business School stands by three core values, embodying diversity, embracing innovation, and encouraging opportunities. Exploring what it means to be innovative in business and academics can mean many different things. Let’s look at GBSB Global Business School’s core value, embracing innovation and see how it is being applied to higher education at GBSB Global and what can be done to further create change worldwide.
“GBSB Global Business School offers business programs that encourage, nurture, and develop the innovative potential our students possess. We strive to have an impact on our graduates’ and their ability to effectively manage, articulate, and implement innovative processes within their places of employment. Managers with the right vision, drive the demand for innovation through well-developed businesses and successfully executed strategies which affect the ongoing supply of high quality innovation. We aspire to create a better world by promoting the importance of innovation within our curriculum, preparing students to seek opportunities to find creative solutions that will impact the economy.”
In order to be competitive in a world where the expiration date of business models is shortening. Business schools need to provide its future leaders with the skills and experience that give them the courage to imagine, test, and implement new ways of doing business, ultimately giving them the cutting edge.ii Business schools need to abandon old belief patterns about what innovation is, how it works and what impact it has on society and learn how to embrace it by engineering and constructing a platform for business transformation across borders and industries.
In the article Education is Ripe for Disruption published by Huffington Post, the journalist Eric Sheniger wrote, "Education is ripe for disruptive change leading to innovative practices that improve learning outcomes for our students."iii We couldn’t agree more.
GBSB Global Business School encourages a deeper level of learning by doing that is meant to create an awareness of the greater scheme. How one fragment, education, can lead to a total upheaval of how the world perceives the traditional business model landscape. By furthering young adult’s capacity to create, fostering their talents and skills, business schools construct the ideal environment for ongoing research, culture change, student engagement, and sharing.
Today’s seismic shifts in how we live our lives and conduct business are a direct result of increased technological advancements, and the trend will continue to grow in ways we may not even be able to imagine yet.
Just think back on how times have changed. Do you remember when you had to rent movies on VHS from Blockbuster or your local convenience store? Now, Netflix has a whole gamut of media online enabling a one stop, you don’t have to leave the comfort of your couch, shopping experience.
Did you ever own a Blackberry? Well, if you didn’t, it was actually a very popular mobile cellular phone in the early 2000’s until the iPhone came along and trumped its usability and technological variables, making not only the Blackberry, but many cell phones obsolete.
Last, but not least, we can see the transformation in innovation happening right before our eyes. Transportation has been given a facelift with the emergence of Uber and rideshare options. The days of the dated taxi cab service, hailing a car on a street corner are almost through. With various applications available online and through your smart phone, the way society perceives transportation has evolved.
What is the motive to these examples? Innovation.
Higher education institutes need to champion a vision of the world a few years from now and continue to manipulate that version to the business market.
The examples teach a compelling lesson schools can learn from. There are similarities between business schools and companies that can be likened to renting VHS tapes and owning a Blackberry. We must embrace innovation, or be left behind in a trail of dust.v
By employing disruptive innovation strategies, we as members of society and academic institutions can begin the process of constructing a more relevant learning culture for our students that will better prepare them for what the future has in store.vi Taking a stance and taking an alternative approach to innovation compels educators to go against the grain, to challenge the status quo and become the resistance, shifting the way business is taught in an academic setting.
If we stay with the same old way of thinking, we will never get new results. And that is one of the main reasons why digital leadership in which many of GBSB Global Business School’s programs explore is so important in this period of rapid change.
"Think differently. Learn differently." By giving students the tools and skills, placing them at the core of the education process, allowing them to feel empowered will create a new breed of business leaders.vii GBSB Global Business School is charting a new path, traveling the road less travelled and creating a curriculum that reflects the changing demands of the business world. It is no longer business as usual, but rather business as unusual as GBSB Global embraces innovation in the classroom.
Written by Emily Dawn Szajda, GBSB Global Content Manager
[ii] [vi] Flanagan, Christine. Business Model Innovation: A Blueprint for Higher Education. 01 November 2012. EDU Cause Review. Retrieved from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2012/11/business-model-innovation--a-blueprint-for-higher-education
[iii] [iv] [v] [vii] Sheninger, Eric. 30 August 2016. Education is ripe for Disruption. Huffpost. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-sheninger/education-is-ripe-for-dis_b_11767198.html
