Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/54894
FOCUS ON INNOVATION implement innovations in their curricula. His thoughts below reinforce the sense among educators that now is the time for change—and that the biggest mistake they can make is to believe that the last century's model of business education is sufficient to advance management in the years ahead. On disruptive innovation… At one level, there is innovation in the business school. As faculty, when we do research, we bring what we learn into the courses we teach. We learn new things, and we write new cases. Vijay Govindarajan Create Space For Innovation Vijay Govindarajan has spent years developing a sense of what it takes to execute innovative ideas within organiza- tions. He served as the first Chief Innovation Consultant for General Electric and today sits as the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Busi- ness at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. His book with Chris Trimbull, The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge, came out last fall. In a recent conversation with BizEd, Govindarajan spoke about the obstacles business schools face as they design and 48 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 But we haven't seen disruptive innovations in the busi- ness school. By that I mean we haven't seen what has hap- pened in the computer industry when mainframes were disrupted by personal computers or what happened in the music industry when the iPod fundamentally changed how people listen to music. The question is, is that kind of dis- ruptive innovation needed in our industry? My gut feeling tells me it is. Disruptive innovations happen when there are funda- mental, nonlinear changes within an industry. Already, I see three trends that will call for business schools to make deep- er fundamental changes. First, we have seen such phenom- enal advances in digital technologies, from data to voice to video and now to telepresence, which may be replaced by something else in the future. Second, we have seen the emergence of countries such as India and China, where there is a tremendous need for MBA education. Finally, we have seen the appearance of a whole new set of competitors coming from India and China that are world-class, but they have very different orthodoxies and different needs. These three trends will affect how we deliver, to whom we connect, what we teach, how we teach, and how we need to be thinking about innovation. On obstacles to innovation… If you think of some of the biggest innovations of the last decade, you can wonder, why was Netflix not innovated by Blockbuster? Why was Google not innovated by Microsoft? Why was Skype not innovated by AT&T? I have come to the conclusion that there are three traps that prevent some organizations from becoming innovative. The physical trap is an organization's unwillingness to abandon current investments. This was the problem for Blockbuster—it was unwilling to abandon its brick-and- mortar infrastructure even when it saw NetFlix coming. Business schools suffer from that same problem. We have so much infrastructure built to support our current business