innovation Archives - GlobalFocus

Experiences with virtual meetings One of the biggest challenges for leaders during the pandemic has been adapting to virtual meetings. In the past, it’s been the person with the loudest voice in the room or the one who gets to interrupt first, who usually has the most influence. Now it’s more likely to be the…

The working world - world of 2030

The Vision By 2030, over 70% of the workforce will be comprised of generation X and millennials. The economic effects of COVID-19 will feel like a distant memory and work itself will be integrated into a broader holistic lifestyle. The working world will be thriving as human respect and kindness take centre stage. Navigating change…

2020 has been a turning point in history. The pandemic has disrupted life across the globe, leading to millions of deaths and crippling large parts of the world’s economies. It has made leaders stop and think about their priorities more powerfully than any other recent event. Just one year ago, in the introduction to a…

With the Corona crisis hitting higher education institutions, there is a good deal of buzz and discussion about how this will “dramatically and inevitably” change the way universities work and teach. However… this may not be true for everyone, observes Bernhard Bachmann Let’s look at some of the hype. The supposed “disruption” caused by COVID-19…

Online learning has taken on an entirely new dimension during the COVID-19 crisis. The enormity of the situation has forced us to innovate, change and adopt new technologies and ways of working at an exceptionally accelerated rate. By Anne Vaxelaire With students spread all over the world, QTEM (Quantitative Techniques for Economics and Management), a…

While backward design has been widely accepted as the ‘right’ way to proceed when designing new courses or units, John Mullins and Arun Pereira argue that, for some business schools, an alternative approach, which they call effectual design, may potentially be a superior approach to course design It has been widely accepted in recent years…

Saleema Vellani explores the entrepreneurial mindset and considers how the future landscape of personal exploration, employment and industry will require ubiquitous innovation skills of new graduates and business leaders alike In January 2020, the World Economic Forum kicked off the Reskilling Revolution Platform with the aim of retooling one billion people over the next ten…

Business education worldwide has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Martin Lockett looks at the challenges faced by business schools and the opportunities that are now emerging No one imagined that 2020 would be a year of massive disruption in business schools. But as the year started, the first cases of COVID-19 were becoming public…

Boston University’s Questrom School of Business is creating an innovative approach to identifying co-operative ways to improve business education. By Paul Carlile, Steven Davidson and Howard Thomas The Business Education Jam Global Symposium was held at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, in November 2019. This unique collaboration brought together 31…

Johan Roos says we must learn how to make best use of the input of academics and scholars to recover from an unprecedented pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic is testing every thread in the fabric of humanity – our personal lives, families, jobs, communities, companies, nations and the entire world as we know it. What is…

Educational institutions globally are facing major challenges, a function of tectonic shifts in the techno-socio-economic landscape and the digital revolution occurring in Industry 4.0, ushering in the shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy. Atish Chattopadhyay explains what might be in store IFIM Business School, Bangalore, India, in association with National Human Resources Development…

We do not need to read journals or study research results to know that the world is changing rapidly. We just need to look around and see what is happening. Our lives are being transformed by technology, bringing with it some real benefits and many thorny problems. We are experiencing social change on a…

Leadershift: Creating the innovation-ready organisation

There is perhaps no greater challenge for modern leaders than to protect their companies from the threats of the near-term future. Companies such as Woolworths, HMV, and Thomas Cook failed to meet the challenge of external threats. In contrast, companies building processes to import innovations developed outside of the organisation are maintaining their relevance…

Engaging with Technology

Why this time around is different Getting computers to do our bidding has always been a bit mysterious to those of us not steeped in machine code, operating systems, and programming. We were content, if that is the right word, to muddle through command-line interfaces (CLIs) and then GUIs (graphical user interfaces), the ones…

Achieving_success_in_digital_transformation

– GOLD WINNER OF THE 2019 EXCELLENCE IN PRACTICE AWARDS – Digital technology over the past few years has been developing faster than industries can exploit its advantages. In particular, traditional players with their roots in the pre-digital era must learn to adapt fast. When launching digital transformation initiatives, many organisations start with low-hanging fruit such…

Top_team_drives_business_transformation

– GOLD WINNER OF THE 2019 EXCELLENCE IN PRACTICE AWARDS – They say that “no organisation outperforms its top team”. And that principle is at the heart of the project described here where a top team learns new ways of working and leading in order to succeed in a challenging competitive situation. Endo is a global…

How_to_accelerate

– SILVER WINNER OF THE 2019 EXCELLENCE IN PRACTICE AWARDS – Santander a Group is a Spanish multinational commercial bank and financial services company founded in Santander, Spain, and whose HQ is located in Madrid. The bank looks after 144 million customers worldwide and has a proud 161-year history of success. But past glory does not…

Accelerated_excellence2

– SILVER WINNER OF THE 2019 EXCELLENCE IN PRACTICE AWARDS – How do you – as a car manufacturer – influence your dealer network, ramp up customer satisfaction, improve sales and profits, and at the same time involve the dealers in paying the investments”? Questions Porsche AG was asking itself back in 2012. It was the…

Leadership_developent_has_to_reflect

Bayer AG is a life science company with more than 150 years of history and core competencies in healthcare and agriculture. The company operates in pharmaceuticals, consumer health, crop science and animal health. It has recently acquired Monsanto and thereby become the market leader in agriculture. Bayer faces a number of concurrent challenges. It…

Through_the_labyrinth

How to navigate the maze of teaching digital transformation, by Kyriakos Kyriakopoulos and Marina Gryllaki. In industry after industry, dominant, established firms face a tsunami of digital disruption with the odds typically against them. Firms initially snubbed digital disruption or at best grafted digital infrastructure onto their existing processes and systems. But, sooner rather…

Preparing_students

Ishwar Puri and Leonard Waverman describe how a new programme at a top Canadian university breaks down academic barriers and allows students to pursue their interests across the campus in collaborative and experiential ways. At Canada’s McMaster University, hundreds of undergraduate students are embarking on an educational adventure. As they pursue their core programmes…

Positive_learning_on_carbon_neutrality

A leading Canadian school helps students to live their sustainable curriculum. By Simon Pek, Rick Cotton and Mackenzie Ford. Growing a world-class, competitive business school and being a leader in sustainability may seem like two juxtaposed goals but the University of Victoria’s Peter B Gustavson School of Business, in Victoria, BC, has found a…

The_challenge_of_change

Throughout history people have thought that theirs was a truly transformative time. In hindsight they were often wrong but, says Bert van der Zwaan, now there are reasons to believe that the world of higher education at least is changing more profoundly than ever. As an institution the university is being forced to adapt…

Martin Moehrle, Associate Director of Corporate Services, EFMD. Corporate training departments were established in the early 20th century, at first to enable the workforce to masterwork processes to deliver quality products; then, later, as corporate learning functions, to pursue one or more of the following objectives: • Supporting individuals in improving their performance and…

Business students should be more knowledgeable about new technologies say, Mukul Kumar and Johan Roos. Business schools need to accelerate how they enable students to partner with engineers and scientists, bring tech-driven innovations to market in responsible ways, and understand the evolving applications of disruptive technologies in society. STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)…

Saumya Sindhwani, Jerry Connor and Howard Thomas argue it is time to change the way we develop leaders – and tap into the power of mindset. Every year hundreds of books are written on leadership; business schools turn out thousands of graduates; and businesses spend millions on leadership development. But are we focusing on…

Ajoy Kumar Dey explains how the MBA curriculum is kept fresh and relevant at a leading Indian institution. In their renowned article “How business schools lost their way” in the Harvard Business Review (May, 2005) the authors Warren Bennis and James O’Toole warned that business schools are on the wrong track. Even if the…

Dan Pontefract chronicles a cautionary tale of a major US company that forgot its commitment to Open Thinking and paid a heavy price. Good thinking is required by all of us if we wish to explore new landscapes or decide how to travel from point A to B. If your thinking style is closed —…

The impact of technology, already hugely significant, is about to become even more intense. Prabhu Guptara asks if business schools are ready. In January 2018, I started a research project to understand how business schools are responding to the new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and to assess whether our graduates are really being prepared…

– GOLD WINNER OF THE 2018 EXCELLENCE IN PRACTICE AWARDS – In 2014, Valmet – a new organisation born out of a de-merger in the seemingly unsexy, unwanted industry of capital equipment and services for the pulp, paper and energy industries – sought to make the most of its leadership development programmes. How? By turning the…