Interview: INSEAD Dean On The School’s New Bay Area Hub & More

INSEAD FIRST CONSIDERED PRINCETON, THEN LONG ISLAND CITY IN NEW YORK BEFORE SAN FRANCISCO

After he was appointed dean in October of 2013, Mihov began conversations about the possibility with Peter Zemsky, the dean of executive education and a professor of strategy and innovation. “He actually orchestrated this whole thing so he should take all the credit,” adds Mihov. “But we started talking about a place in the U.S. because we have a lot of executive education clients and we thought about those programs first.” At first, INSEAD zeroed in on a location in Princeton, then New York.

“We even selected a garage kind of place in Long Island City which later on Amazon was going to build their offices there,” he says. “But it didn’t work for us and it didn’t work for them. And then the alumni here started saying there are so many alumni in the Valley and they were super excited about this. We started looking and all of a sudden you start to realize there are so many things that we can do here. We think that INSEAD can contribute a lot and can learn from the environment. The moment we figured out it would be San Francisco we started looking for a place and it just took some time.”

Two years ago, when Mihov first walked into the space, largely a garage with a small office building in front of it, he was not all that impressed. “You know I was worried when we first came and saw all the cars parked in the garage,” he says. “My worry was it looked like a really cold place. There are other schools with locations here—let’s not named them—and they are empty and lifeless. That is not what we want here. We want this to be a lively place, active all the time. We told our alumni to come and use this place for meetings. Alumni helped us build it so they should be able to use it.”

EXPECTS TO RUN 20 EXEC ED PROGRAMS OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO EVERY YEAR

Mihov has no reservations anymore. “I think it is absolutely fabulous,” Mihov says. “It feels very welcoming and very different from everything else at INSEAD. This is super exciting because we are so immersed in the whole thing you don’t realize how important it is for the school.”

INSEAD already has three to four executive education programs scheduled for each of the next four months at the new campus. The school aims to put on 20 exed ed offerings a year here, not including modules of other existing programs started on its other campuses. The San Francisco hub will also serve as a home base for MBAs taking field trips to the Bay Area and for a module of elective coursework for its Executive MBA students.

But open enrollment exec ed will largely be the focus. “We need executive education to make it viable,” he says. “Otherwise we cannot sustain this. We will create courses that are better taught in this area than any other part of the world, including the future of artificial intelligence with Singularity University. People are going up with so many ideas and the faculty is very willing to come and teach here and support the development of the facility.”

ONE POSSIBILITY: A SAN FRANCISCO EXPERIENCE FOR INSEAD MBAS AFTER GRADUATION?

Mihov says that at a steady-state, INSEAD will likely use the facility for 20 to 25 weeks of executive education programming. “We need ten weeks to make it viable from a financial point of view. We will be easily beyond that.” He expects more offerings through INSEAD’s partnership with Singularity, too. “We didn’t have Singularity on our radar screen until six months ago. So all of a sudden this is coming and with Singularity we can do so many other things.”

“Interesting things started coming up,” he adds. “Some of our students want to come and learn about the ecosystem here. They want to come and spend some time here so that will be happening as well. Some of our alumni entrepreneurs want to spend time here and some corporations want to come here to better understand the startup ecosystem. We can help them in a way because we hope to be embedded in the ecosystem.”

For now, however, the dean is ruling out the possibility of an Executive MBA or an MBA program in San Francisco. “We already split the MBA cohorts between the two campuses (in France and Singapore) so we start with 300 in Fontainebleau and 200 in Singapore twice a year,” explains Mihov. “And the networking ability is very important. Already our students move between the two campuses so 75% experience both campuses. If we created a third place, it becomes really difficult. In the beginning, I was thinking we could create a period for the MBAs to be here or two months but recent alums were against it because they said we already suffer from the two campus structure. ‘We can’t build the relationships we’d like. We are still okay because there are big benefits in being both in Asia and Europe but if you put one more location it complicates it.'”