Exclusive: INSEAD’s Dean Talks New Online Degree, New MBA Curriculum & What Comes After Covid

BUILDING A SUSTAINABILITY FRAMEWORK

Ilian Mihov, dean of INSEAD

It’s in sustainability that INSEAD is making the biggest waves in graduate business education. The school has committed to a 67% greenhouse gas reduction across its four locations by 2035. Last November, INSEAD joined seven other leading business schools to launch the Business Schools for Climate Leadership Initiative, which seeks to accelerate the business response to the climate crisis and “highlight the important role academic institutions must play in providing leadership in times of emergency.”

Pushing further, in January 2022 Mihov formed a curriculum review committee to look at how INSEAD can increase the ESG and sustainability components throughout all core and elective courses. The school last changed its curriculum in 2017, and while it already incorporates sustainable philosophies into almost all courses — it currently boasts 19 elective courses on ESG and sustainability and features related topics in every core course; 12 of 15 INSEAD MBA core courses cover topics related to sustainability — Mihov says “we need to build a better, and more coherent, understanding of these topics.” He asked the committee to look at everything from the introduction of a new core course to widespread changes to the current syllabi. “My guess,” he tells P&Q, “is that what we need to do is to create a capstone, a core course at the end, a required course at the end of the MBA where now you look at the accounting issues from a sustainability point of view. You look at the finance from a sustainable finance point of view. You look at operations, at strategy.” He hopes for a report by the end of the academic year.

“It’s a failure of business schools that in strategy, we have bunch of frameworks — five C’s, whatever. We build in a competitive strategy, or we build the Blue Ocean Strategy, and all these things. We have frameworks of thinking about strategy. In marketing we have frameworks, whether the four P’s or whatever it is. We have frameworks. In economics, we have frameworks, and so on.

“But we don’t have a framework that we can build around these topics of sustainability or ESG, that somebody asks this guy, and then he says, ‘Okay, let me refresh what I learned, what is the framework used,’ and quickly run a brainstorming session and build the proper response, proper strategy, to this. That’s where I think that we are still not there. A lot of research needs be done.”

VITAL TO LEARNING: ‘HUMAN INTERACTION’

Covid-19 has slowed many plans but it has also sped some up. Mihov says INSEAD will soon launch a new online master in business and data analytics, the school’s first major foray into virtual learning (besides what was necessitated by the pandemic). But he does not expect the school to wade into the pool of online MBAs, at least not while he is still dean.

“I think that it’s a bit early for an online MBA,” Mihov says. “I still think that most of the learning happens in this interactions. When you’re studying general management, a big part is human interaction.”

This is not just a theory. Mihov, who earned a bachelor’s in business administration from the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina, and a master in economics and Ph.D. from Princeton, was a professor at INSEAD for 17 years before becoming dean. He is currently the Rausing chaired professor of economic and business transformation.

“For me, a big part of learning happens when somebody in the classroom asks a question,” he says. “I can see it when I was teaching where somebody asks a question, then people start thinking. You could see that they’d start thinking, how would I answer the question? What does it mean? This is very active way of learning. That’s when these neurons connections start firing. They listen how the professor answers the question.”

See how Ilian Mihov answers questions — on such topics as application volume this cycle and INSEAD’s ambitious carbon emissions goals for the next decade — on the next pages. P&Q‘s Q&A with Mihov has been edited for length and clarity.

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