A future for business education: why business as usual is bad business

Business education is relatively young, about 140 years old. It started as a case study-based approach with little by way of a conceptual foundations. A key reason in the view is that business education has gradually served as a “general purpose technology”. It could be argued that the evolution of business education has gone from practice to theory and back to practice. Today business education is a multi-billion-euro sector. Popular magazines, such as Fortune, wonder what is killing business education in the US. Starting with students, the success of business education led to business schools often becoming the cash cows of financially challenged institutions. Not surprisingly, many a commentator, including numerous documentaries and dramatisations of the crisis, questioned the role and legitimacy of business education. Business education and the business schools need to be re-imagined, adapted to and help shape the (a brighter) future.