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24 November/ December 2014 BizEd 1 2 3 4 5 6 students in global environments and assigns them to work with real- world partners through a yearlong program called Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Develop- ment (FIELD). Emory's Goizueta Business School pursues a similar mission with Management Practice, a sequence of courses that lead to field assignments with clients such as GE, Delta Air Lines, and AT&T. Mean- while, students at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management watch surgeries being performed and visit community clinics as part of a healthcare immersion course. If business schools are going to stay relevant in today's fast-chang- ing economy, we must offer rich, meaningful experiences that stu- dents can't have with competitors such as for-profit institutions and online MOOCs. We must trans- form ourselves from knowledge dispensaries into innovation hubs. To do that, we must stimulate creative thinking, which is the process of idea generation; and we must encourage critical thinking, which is the process of analyz- ing data, synthesizing information from multiple sources, and evaluat- ing solutions. At the Smith School, we're working to bring reality- based learning into every class. How? We follow these six steps: Open two-way channels. We supplement traditional classroom instruction with real-world experi- ence so that students don't just learn about companies—companies learn about students. Such expo- sure often leads to internships, job offers, and other exciting opportuni- ties. As an example, for the past five years, Smith professor David Kass has taken his students to Omaha, Nebraska, for Berkshire Hatha- way's annual shareholder meeting. In 2014, the Fox Business news network invited Smith students to participate in a live on-air conversa- tion with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet and his most famous board member, Bill Gates. Get out of the silo. We develop relationships across campus by partnering with other thriving pro- grams at the university, because students learn to think more inno- vatively when they work across disciplines. For instance, QUEST, a reality-based honors program, puts business, engineering, and com- puter science students together in the same classrooms. Work cross-culturally. We push business students out of their comfort zones and help them to see past geopolitical and cultural boundaries to view problems from multiple perspectives. When I accompanied Smith students on a 2014 trip to China, they didn't experience the country in a bubble; they participated in a business plan competition that included multina- tional teams. (See "Venture Cultur- alists" in the September/October 2014 issue of BizEd, page 72.) Emulate real business. Smith professors Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch revamped their entre- preneurship course in 2012 after their research showed that few ven- ture capitalists read business plans. Now, instead of spending a semester creating charts and summaries for potential investors, students launch actual companies in a course called the Real Entrepreneurship Competi- tion. They also learn to create a "business model canvas"—a term coined by Alexander Osterwalder— to answer nine key questions about what kind of business they're creat- ing, what customers it will serve, and how it will make money. Allow flexibility. We realize that a great learning experience for one student might not serve another. To teach ethics, we used to require all students to visit a prison, where they spent half a day meeting former executives prosecuted for white-col- lar crimes. The program worked well for many students, but not all. Now we allow options for studying ethical business, including opportunities to focus on social entrepreneurship and social value creation. Unleash the faculty. We know that deans sometimes can drive innova- tion simply by getting out of the way of faculty. Most academics become professors because they crave mean- ingful interaction with students. They want to impact their students and how they think. In turn, they're infected by the enthusiasm of their students, creating a contagious atmo- sphere of innovation. Incubating Ideas By following these six approaches to teaching business, we show stu- dents how to bring creative solu- tions to real-world problems. We turn the school into an incubator for ideas—and we raise the roof on innovation. Alex Triantis is dean of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the Univer- sity of Maryland in College Park. To stay relevant in today's fast-changing economy, we must offer rich, meaningful experiences.