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Encouraging Innovation As students grow more sophisticated, they'll undoubt- edly demand more multifaceted learning experiences. But how well business schools meet students' demand for fresh approaches often comes down to two factors: the faculty's time and the school's money. Professors who believe they don't have time to integrate innovative concepts into their courses should look at innova- tion in a different way, says Deborah Streeter of Cornell University. "I challenge any teachers to tell me they don't have time to innovate," she says. "Even if they can't inno- vate on a large scale, they can take small steps. They can find something great that other people have done and bring it into their own classrooms." As to money, that's an issue for the business schools themselves. When asked what institutions can do to encour- age new approaches in their classrooms, these educators offered the following suggestions: Put innovation in the budget. "The difficulty with innovation in business schools is that there's always a point where faculty must be approved to proceed, based on whether there's money for it in the budget," says Jay Bernardo of the Asian Institute of Management. "Business schools that reserve funding for innovation, add divisions for new development, and set targets for their faculty for innovation will see their faculty push their curricula forward the most." Reward innovation. Business schools are in grow- ing competition for faculty expertise. On top of that, it's no secret that good business professors with practical experi- ence are often highly sought after by industry, which can offer them higher salaries. To keep their best and most pas- sionate professors on board, business schools must keep Big Risks, Big Rewards Streeter, Ho, Bernardo, and Jones enjoy their roles as inno- vative professors, which hinge on their willingness to take risks. However, they realize that, for some faculty, risk tak- ing isn't exactly the norm. Streeter finds that young faculty, especially, are often afraid to follow "the road less taken" in the classroom, as she did with eClips. They fear that lower evaluation scores, time constraints, and decreased research production may hurt their prospects of advancement. To allay their fears, she often mentors younger faculty to guide them as they try new approaches—and help them recover if those approaches don't go as planned. "If their reviews come up and their evaluations are a little lower, they need to let the administration know they've tried something different," says Streeter. "I've never gotten perfect scores on my teaching evaluations, because I'm always willing to push 30 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2007 them interested, engaged, and rewarded, says Yew Kee Ho of the National University of Singapore Business School. "What keeps many professors in the business school is their passion for education," Ho says. A school that doesn't reward innovative faculty—with competitive salaries or other benefits—"will lose some of its best professors to industry." Be multidimensional. Many schools value only two forms of faculty output—teaching and research. Eli Jones of the University of Houston suggests a third area is equally valuable to a school's reputation and bottom line: commu- nity service. "Business schools need to have multidimensional faculty who can teach, research, and engage in community out- reach," says Jones. "Deans of the future will have to think about their business schools and their faculty in multidimen- sional ways and allocate resources to faculty for community outreach. A business school can't survive if it's not serving its community." Tolerate—and even embrace—failure. "Schools that really want their teachers to become well-known for innovation will have to allow faculty to fail sometimes. Many institutions don't do that so well," says Streeter. "If people aren't in environments that tolerate some level of failure, if they're not encouraged to innovate, they're simply not going to do it." The payoff to business schools comes in "reputational capital," say these professors. The more the public perceives a school to have innovative faculty, the more students will be attracted to its programs. And the more visible a business school's faculty are in the community, the stronger its reputa- tion will become. That alone, they argue, makes these efforts worth paying for. students beyond their comfort zones. When I do, they're often quite ticked off at me at the end!" But when she surveys her students some time after they complete her course, they often think differently. "A year lat- er, my students will tell me that their experience in the course was amazing," she says. "They've been able to put what they learned to work." No innovation comes without someone stepping beyond the status quo—that holds particularly true in the business classroom. But when that innovation adds spark and rele- vance to a student's learning experience, it only helps solidify a school's reputation for excellent education, say these edu- cators. More important, it helps students to adopt a more in- novative, creative, and "beyond-the-box" mindset—which, as it happens, is just what many of today's employers are looking for. ■ z