With the imbalance between climate change and growing threats to human well-being, business is being pressured to embrace human and planetary concerns rather than profit maximization. So is business education.
As we show in this FT report on responsible business education, there are many examples of business schools responding to calls for reform from students, teachers, employers and communities.
The FT covers these issues in its Business Education report and is working to adapt its rating system to business schools to increase research – and credit – for activities around sustainability and social purpose.
But metrics have limits. As the wide-ranging debate about the environmental, social and governance responsibilities of businesses shows, some topics are difficult to measure simply, relatively and universally. The same is true in education, which plays a vital role in training the next generation of managers and entrepreneurs.
That’s why we launched our Responsible Business Education Awards last year, to showcase, reward and encourage examples of individual best practice, ensuring that a wide range of activities are qualitatively analysed.
We are grateful to an exceptional panel of judges who have deep knowledge and passion for the field and are drawn from the corporate world, non-profit organizations, academia and more.
An important takeaway from the awards’ second year is that the strength of the inaugural winners was not a one-off. We received another impressive list of submissions from around the world and identified several strong projects for the shortlist and joint winners.
This year we adjusted our standards. In the year After focusing on graduates in 2022 as “change-making” entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs as key “outcomes” of business schools, we have shifted our focus to 2023. We looked for examples of practical work where students were “learning by doing” during their studies in projects with third-party organisations.
While the efforts of individual winners are commendable, linking their work to meaningful projects highlights the important role of methodologies. ESMT in Berlin has a responsible leadership fellowship, for example, allowing MBA and Masters graduates to provide pro-bono support to organizations addressing social challenges in low-income countries.
For another winner, the Hult Prize was an important seedbed, an international competition that challenges university students to solve social problems in business and provides funding to help them test their ideas.
Recognizing the central role it plays in the classroom, our second award this year was for innovative approaches to education – focused on decision-making for sustainability or climate change adaptation.
A growing number of business schools offer a wide range of educational programs that are impactful as they reach large numbers of students. The judges concluded that they offered online training, simulations, coaching, mentoring and even meditation that went beyond traditional subjects.
A number has been written by several authors at various business schools and made available online for free, giving maximum access to peers elsewhere.
The final award was for academic research with evidence of societal impact and acceptance in practice. The best ones are typically written by multiple authors based in different institutions, faculties, and countries and published by multiple outlets.
Causality is not simple. Too often, however, scholars continue to define impact as simply publishing in specialized journals, which provide rigorous peer review but narrow readership. The best ones at least want to report or notice their research in the media and professional outlets.
In contrast, the best articles described efforts by their authors to disseminate their ideas widely, engage in public debate, and engage directly with government and private sector organizations in decision-making. The scale of their success was staggering, in the diverse fields of modern slavery and organ transplants.
Good academic researchers may not always be the best candidates to disseminate or apply their ideas widely, and pressures to produce practical applications should not be allowed to undermine their intellectual freedom.
But greater efforts are needed by business schools to focus on societal challenges, connect their ideas to practice, and encourage highly tailored incentives for research unrelated to teaching or outcomes.
We welcome feedback on these awards, ideas for improvement, and how we can achieve a deeper and broader range of offerings in the future—especially from business schools in North America and Western Europe.
Andrew Jack is the FT’s international education editor.
