At The Robinson College Of Business, A New Era — And Scale — Of Interdisciplinary Learning

The Georgia State Robinson College of Business has built a new kind of business school, where they take the meaning of interdisciplinary to a whole new level.

When Richard Phillips first accepted the Robinson College’s deanship more than a decade ago, he made it a priority to better understand how his graduates were bringing value to the market. Phillips visited some of the more than 90,000 Robinson alumni seeking honest — and critical — opinions about Robinson grads.

His questions for them: What do you think of our graduates? What inter-business problems keep you up at night? How can the business school help?

THE ULTIMATE MUST-HAVES: DATA SKILLS

Phillips found that employers viewed Robinson graduates as solid employees who kept pace with their peers from top neighboring schools. But what they were looking for — and what Robinson needed to produce more of — was data-savvy individuals.

“‘They’d tell me, ‘We are no longer a bank or airline, Rich. We are a data company,’’” explains Phillips. The truth was that few B-schools were producing the type of talent these business leaders were looking for, graduates with expertise in data science and analytics.

“That feedback highlighted a significant gap in the curriculum, driving the need for the Robinson College of Business to evolve and meet the changing demands of the business world,” Phillips tells Poets&Quants.

A BIG INTERDISCIPLINARY FACULTY SHIFT

That’s when Phillips began to shift the direction of the school, refocusing on fostering an interdisciplinary culture to meet the growing demand for data and analytics education. The first step: hiring faculty from diverse backgrounds who traditionally hadn’t been part of the business school ecosystem: computer scientists, data scientists, mechanical engineers, and biostatisticians.

“You have to have both the intellectual horsepower and the emotional fortitude to be able to handle this kind of position, because you’re doing something that’s very different,” says Phillips.

The Robinson faculty’s collaborative spirit is evident — an inherent part of the school’s ethos.

“We offered an alternative for people who were interested in applying what their disciplinary expertise was in partnership with a marketing, finance, or accounting faculty member — and to think about the future of business together,” says Phillips.

TWO NEW INSTITUTES TO SUPPORT CHANGE

Atypical for a dean, Phillips is always part of the hiring process, interviewing every candidate, not just senior faculty, to ensure they fit the culture.

“We tell them, ‘This is novel, interesting, and fun, and you’re going to explore amazing things that you probably wouldn’t be able to do elsewhere. It’s the path less traveled,’” he says.

Students take that path, too — many versions of it. At Robinson, they exercise their intellectual muscles at Robinson’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute, which was created as a means to support students in turning their entrepreneurial ideas into real business ventures.

Around the same time, Robinson launched their Institute for Insight which can be likened to an applied computer science department within their business school. Here, students practice highly applicable and ever-changing data and analytics skills.

NONTRADITIONAL FACULTY WORKING TOGETHER

A biostatistician by training, Professor Yichen Cheng has been teaching at the Institute for Insight since 2016. Typically, those with her background would gravitate to positions either in a Statistics or Biostatistics departments, but she saw an opening at Robinson and took the leap.

“I thought, ‘This could be a good chance, so I’ll take it,’” she says.

Cheng has students from a multitude of backgrounds, and she’s seen the institute grow from supporting a cohort of just three to now a cohort of over 100 each year.

“Working with these students challenges my thinking skills and gives me new perspectives,” she shares.

From the get-go, she’s been working with professors from marketing, finance, and information science.

“Because our department is nontraditional, they don’t have a traditional expectation here,” she says. “I see the types of complex challenges they are working on at Robinson and I realize there is a need for these analytical tools. It’s very interdisciplinary work.”

CULTIVATING PARTNERSHIPS – MERCEDES-BENZ

Another part of developing into a school with strong data and analytics skills is creating sustainable partnerships that support an entrepreneurial ecosystem between the business school and real companies. The Robinson College has a strong relationship with Mercedes-Benz and their Chief HR Officer Lars Minn, who’s been in partnership with the school for nearly eight years.

“Robinson students are working on real-world problems with us,” says Minn. “They have an insatiable hunger, and that’s been consistent over eight years.”

Minn is particularly fond of working with Robinson students on Insight Sprints, collaborative projects where students analyze proprietary data and develop actionable insights.

“What you throw at them, they rise to the occasion,” he shares.

ROBINSON STUDENTS REPRESENT THE FUTURE

Mercedes has had much success with their JAC, or Junior Associate Consultant program – similar to an internship, but continuously throughout the year. Right now Mercedes has 15-20 JACs, and Minn is hoping it grows to 100 in the future.

Minn says that Robinson students represent what the future of Atlanta looks like. “It is the most diverse school in the state’s university system,” he says.

Robinson is flexible, agile, and always ready to help their community, he adds.

“We don’t approach them with a canned set of ideas. We usually approach them with something new, something out of the box, and they’re always able to pull something off the shelf or sit down and curate something new,” shares Minn.