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

The Bay Area immersion for INSEAD’s Master in Management students in June 2021 was the first time the school’s new San Francisco hub was used by degree students

You had Covid in 2020. What was your experience?

I was an early adopter. It was March 2020. I caught it in France, but flew back to Singapore. I was supposed to fly to New York, but then they actually closed the flights, stopped the flights from Europe. My flight was still going, but I was thinking, “Who knows what else they will do, so let me go back to Singapore.”

It was not very bad, in many ways. But at the same time, I ended up in a hospital for four weeks because these were the regulations at the time. At the time, there was no testing. Actually, it was very difficult to get tested. I came back and I was thinking, “Let me prove them that I don’t have it.” I tried to get tested. It was impossible. Finally, I managed to get testing. They sent me to the National Center for Infectious Diseases. They did an X-ray. They did a test and took temperature. They said, “You’re fine. Go home. We’ll call you tomorrow.”

The next day they called me in and they said, “You’re positive.” Then they came with an ambulance, took me to a hospital. I stayed five days in the National Center for Infectious Diseases. Then they transferred me to an isolation facility. Because at the time, the regulation was that you have to test negative, otherwise you are not to be released.

What we learned about Covid and the PCR test is that even though there is no virus anymore, no live virus, you can still test positive. My doctor then reviewed my results. He said, “Well, after 10 days you were already above the threshold of the live viruses. You kept only debris of the virus,” but the machine still shows positive.

I actually am very fortunate because there are people who have long Covid.

Covid has got to be a real challenge for your students, for so many international students coming from all over the world. The challenges must be immense, to travel and just to get to campus — wherever that campus may be.

It is, especially Singapore is challenging. Now, they’re changing a little bit, but they were very, very strict before. Many students would say, “I’d rather go to Fontainebleau.” It’s good that we have more than one campus!

The San Francisco campus is extraordinary, like all of INSEAD’s campuses. Do you have any expansion plans for new campuses anywhere?

No. I think that we are very happy with the current state of affairs. Like most business schools, we suffered a lot, in terms of revenue decline during the pandemic. Now, we are rebuilding. We are almost at the level where we were before the pandemic, so we recovered. Even here now, the manager was telling me that for the year, this place is almost full, which is really great.

I think that out of the four campuses, we’ll focus on three now, with a lot of work. In France, we’re doing a huge master plan to redo most of the campus. The reason we want to do this is because those old buildings do not meet the sustainability goals. We’ll be putting the geothermal there. That’s a huge investment, but again, we need to do that.

Then in Abu Dhabi, we’ll be building a new campus, which will be immersive campus. It’ll be the first Meta campus in the world. It’s not big. It’s about 7,000 square meters. Actually, one of the big innovations we did in the last two years, was virtual reality cases. Before Facebook started talking about Meta, we already were there.

Virtual reality cases are very interesting. They’re interesting because they can teach awareness in different ways of how you learn and how you listen. For example, we have about a dozen cases, because they’re very expensive, so we hire actors. There is a boardroom with eight actors, and you’re sitting with the goggles, and you look, you listen to the conversation and so on. Then you have questions.

We have operations cases, and they’re super interesting. What is interesting is that you basically decide where to look. It’s 360 degrees. You can look back, and you can move between different stances.

But the case in the boardroom is very telling, because they discuss strategy. One of the key points about the case is gender bias. Somebody says something, just a comment in the conversation, and so a few of the students actually notice, and say, “That was not the right thing to say.” Actually, the case is about gender discrimination.

Now, if you try to put it in a regular case, you’ll have to write it. Then people highlight things, and it’ll be too obvious that it’s a gender discrimination case. But if it’s in conversation, it tests completely different skills. Are you really sensitive to this? Can you hear it? In Abu Dhabi, we’ll build a campus with all the necessary equipment, do more of this immersive learning.

Then here in San Francisco, our objective is just to develop this into the vibrant place that we thought it would be.

So INSEAD Shanghai has to wait? INSEAD Mumbai, not any anytime soon?

No, no.

What about online MBA? When will INSEAD enter that space?

We are actually planning an online Master in Business and Data Analytics. I think that it’s a bit early for an online MBA. I still think that most of the learning happens in this interactions. When you’re studying general management, a big part is human interaction.

Maybe we discussed also this last time, but for me, a big part of learning happens when somebody in the classroom asks a question. 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.

If you are watching a video or online, it’s still difficult to get into this. I have this article about the horizontal and vertical learning, that a lot of learning is happening when you go out of the classroom. After the class, you go to lunch and you talk with your colleagues and all this. We still think that for general management it’s gives you a much better learning experience.

But the online Master in Business and Data Analytics, because it’ll be more about technical skills, we’ll bring them on campus for a couple of weeks. But it’ll be designed, again, to build managers who understand data and what you can do with data.

Of course, they’ll learn coding, but we’ll not expect them to go do the coding. Once you start doing coding, you know what is possible. When you see a data set, you can say to coders, “I want to figure out these things.”

Is that imminent, the new degree? Are you going to announce that soon?

I don’t know when we will announce it. The thing is that regulation and accreditation is slow. We are filing right now all the documents to be accredited in France. I think the first intake will be in September 2023.

For all its drawbacks, a lot of schools feel an online MBA is inevitable. Do you feel it’s inevitable, and that the technology needs to improve before INSEAD is ready for it?

To be honest, I don’t know. I really think that the interaction … Let me put it this way. As long as we do management and we do work in-person, then the in-person MBA will still be the right thing to do. If we start doing everything online, if we don’t need an office, and you don’t go to the office and everything is online in the company, all the management is online, then yeah, you can learn these techniques online. But if I have to work in a team in person, all these interactions, you cannot replicate easily on Zoom.

I think that there’ll be more and more of the online MBA, but in some sense it’ll be different. It’ll teach skills, but it’ll teach different skills. The demand from the students is clearly for in person. You’ve heard those other students complaining about too much remote learning.

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