The comments from my last blog got me thinking about MBA programs in general and Masters in Innovation programs in particular.
The businesses that are succeeding today (and by succeeding I mean are having huge growth in acceptance, revenue, valuation, etc.) are the ones that are disrupting the status quo in novel ways. So if these are today’s successful businesses, where can students go to learn these new ways of thinking, the new skills and the new business paradigms that create successful disruptors?
MBA programs are good at teaching people how to analyze everything that moves, preserve the status quo, and avoid risk. But they don’t do a very good job of teaching students to think outside the box. There may be courses within an MBA on disruption but I haven’t found one.
I thought that perhaps there might be Masters of Innovation programs that teach disruption in general but my quick review of these programs is that they seem to favour continuous innovation and fitting in to corporate norms. I’m still searching for a program in disruption but not having much success.
There are disruptive ideas in every part of a business. They crop up in human resources through the adoption of Holocracy. They create new means of financing such as crowd funding. They disrupt supply chains as Amazon has done. They change the face of marketing through social media. I could go on and on with how every facet of our lives is being disrupted but I think you get the point.
We are living through a time of massive disruption and yet I can’t find anyone focussing on disruption in a business program. I think we need to remedy this. We need to create a Masters of Disruption.
We could cover basic business topics in such a Masters but focus on how the world of business is being disrupted right now. Even more, we could challenge students to become disruptors themselves, to find new ways to alter the status quo.
I suppose we can’t call it a Masters if Disruption as I don’t think that would fly very well at an interview. (Can you see your typical HR manager actually want to hire a disruptor?) But we could easily focus on just such a topic through series of courses on innovation.
But to actually create just such a program I suspect that we need a disruption in business education. And how we do that is leaving me stumped.