Poets&Quants’ MBA Program Of The Year For 2023: INSEAD

Francisco Veloso began his term as INSEAD’s dean on September 1. In January the B-school will implement a “renewed” curriculum with sustainability at its heart. Courtesy photos

A sustainability-focused MBA makes sense for a few reasons, says Urs Peyer, dean of degree programs at INSEAD.

“(Sustainability) is a global problem which needs to be solved, sometimes locally or regionally. For us to bring all these different perspectives together so that people understand the complexity of sustainability, that was one of the drivers,” Peyer told Poets&Quants in May.

“We also have a lot of research, going back 20 years or so, from a business point of view. We can advise companies on doing environmental and social types of transformations. Our faculty sort of coined the expression, ‘circular economy,’ and have advised the European regulations on the circular economy.”

He stresses, as Dean Veloso does, the importance of the capstone course: Before they graduate from the program, INSEAD MBA students must analyze a business situation and evaluate solutions. They must use the sustainability skills they spent 10 months learning and apply them to all aspects of management.

“We designed this new capstone so that we can actually showcase many win-win situations. There are solutions out there that make sense economically, and environmentally and socially,” Peyer says.

”There are some that are in conflict, no question, and the answer is not that easy. So, the exciting thing for me is we use these scenarios to also get the discussion going, to see what needs to happen in order to get a better equilibrium outcome for the world, not just for the shareholder or the environment.”

Students in a virtual reality workshop at INSEAD’s Abu Dhabi campus

‘I WANT THIS TO BE PART OF MY DECISION TOOLKIT’

Dean Francisco Veloso began his tenure with INSEAD in September, coming to a program that had already committed to its full-throated embrace of sustainability that will go into effect in January 2024. And that was something that made the lifelong academic and former dean of both Imperial College Business School and Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics overjoyed to join the school. At Imperial, he garnered plaudits for leading the development of a 10-year strategy to bolster the school’s prominence as a leading research business school, one that gains recognition not only for digital innovation but also for teaching and research that address the critical challenges facing business and society today. In a CentreCourt fireside chat when he was dean at Imperial, Veloso discussed the need to cultivate “empathy, judgment and responsibility,” not merely technical skills for MBA students. “We have to shape business and society but also to prepare our students to drive that change for good,” he said.

On a recent visit to INSEAD’s San Francisco campus in the city’s South Beach district, a short walk from the San Francisco Giants’ Oracle Park, Veloso talked with Poets&Quants about his enthusiasm for the ongoing and planned integration of sustainability into the fabric of the INSEAD MBA — what it means in theory and what it means practically.

“I think the generations that are getting to the MBA now are already themselves much more sensitive and much more aware of the challenge of having a more sustainable world, and therefore the need to do something around that,” Veloso says. “So in that sense, we are responding to the needs of the world, but we’re also responding to the needs of the students themselves that feel, ‘I know this is important, so I want to learn more about this. I want this to be part of my decision toolkit.’”

INSEAD’s Fontainebleau campus

INSEAD’S MISSION: PREPARING TRANSFORMATIVE LEADERS

INSEAD, ranked No. 2 in the world in The Financial Times’ 2023 Global MBA Ranking and No. 1 in Poets&quants’ 2023-2024 International MBA ranking, isn’t only an MBA factory — it’s also a bulwark of thought leadership. The B-school’s Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society, founded in 2018, is home to some of the world’s most sought-after consultants and teachers in the realm of sustainability. It not only produces world-class research; it leverages that research to inform the business practices of INSEAD’s partners — all in service to the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Institute, its webpage declares, offers “transformational learning experiences that open mindsets to ideate and explore creative solutions.”

The producer of much world-class research himself, Veloso nods to the Hoffmann Institute as another point of pride, instrumental in supporting INSEAD’s commitment to sustainability.

“It has supported our faculty that have meaningful and significant research projects that they want to develop for which they would require some funding,” Veloso says. “The second area has been precisely to support all the work that was required to reform the curriculum and to develop the necessary tools and toolkits to develop that. All that has been with the support of the Hoffmann Institute.

“And then the third part is that it has increased the awareness and the engagement of the broader community with the sustainability topic. Because the mission of INSEAD is one of transformation and preparing these leaders that can have this transformative role. So when we think about what society is asking us from today, of course the transition to a more sustainable society is absolutely critical. And so the Hoffmann Institute is also an instrument for us to engage with the broader business community and to sensitize them to the importance of this topic, and to work with them and try to help them in terms of solutions, connecting that back to the research that our faculty are doing on various things.

“It could be on climate, it can sometimes be on issues that are more related to inequality and other aspects, or various aspects related to the SDGs. Of course, climate is a very important part of that, but the S and the G are also very important. And that’s very relevant for INSEAD because INSEAD is very, very strong in the strategy, in the behavior, in the governance area — in the infusion that we can bring to business leaders for them to better understand issues of governance, so they can be a more stakeholder-oriented business, so they can have a different attitude, so they can promote a more equitable set of outcomes. All of this is quite important. And the Hoffmann Institute is important in all these dimensions and in the connection between them.”

Next page: More about INSEAD’s new curriculum from P&Q’s exclusive one-on-one interview with INSEAD Dean Francisco Veloso

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