A Push for Research and Internationalization in European Business Schools

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00770.x
Date01 September 2011
AuthorJoan E. Ricart
Published date01 September 2011
Viewpoint
A Push for Research and
Internationalization in European
Business Schools
Joan E. Ricart
IESE Business School, Strategic Management, Adv. Pearson 21, Barcelona 08034, Spain
Email: JERicart@iese.edu
The British Journal of Management is celebrating
its 25th anniversary this year, and soon I will be
celebrating 27 years as a management professor
at IESE Business School. This is close enough in
time to consider the changes and evolution of my
school, and to reflect that they are representative
of the changes management education has
suffered in Europe.
The context
My relationship with IESE goes further back in
time. Still at engineering school (1977), I started
working as research assistant for my mentor,
Professor Josep Riverola, now Emeritus Professor
at IESE. My job was to take care of the computer
centre, which then housed a single computer with
32 kbytes of memory and which served five
terminals around the school, as well as to develop
some programs and teaching materials for opera-
tions research. I graduated shortly afterwards,
and then worked for my doctoral degree in
engineering and my PhD in managerial economics
and decision sciences at Northwestern University.
I went back to IESE in 1984 as a professor.
The school was quite different back then,
essentially in two important dimensions: inter-
nationalization and research. Let me deal with
each one at a time.
Internationalization
One can truly say that IESE was always an inter-
national business school. In fact, the Spanish lang-
uage helped us to reach other parts of the world very
early on, but we still had to wait a few years to see a
real push in this direction. Twenty-five years later,
English now dominates; the full-time MBA, the
Global Executive MBA and the Doctoral Pro-
gramme are all totally international in any sense
you can consider: participants, faculty, delivery
language, content and so on. But this is also true of
the overall aspects of the school and even in executive
education, despite a very large offering in Spanish.
All leading business schools in Europe, at
different speeds and to different degrees, have
internationalized their operations. MBA students
and faculty search for international environ-
ments, and local products are reduced to the
otherwise quite popular product of Executive
MBA – and even in this format, internationaliza-
tion is a positive value from the participants’
point of view. In a world rapidly globalizing in
many aspects, training future leaders requires a
very international context and perspective.
In my early years, 25 years ago, internationa-
lization meant visiting the USA from time to time
and importing and translating some of the
While this essay only reflects my opinions and all
mistakes are mine, it has benefited from comments from
the co-editors and Professors Andreu and Ferraro of
IESE Business School. The insights from Professor
Ferraro, especially, helped to sharpen and develop some
key arguments presented here. My most sincere grati-
tude to all of them.
British Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 550–554 (2011)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00770.x
r2011 The Author
British Journal of Management r2011 British Academy of Management. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.

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