The Value-Added of MBA Program Innovation

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, building on its position as a leader in management education, launched a new and innovative curriculum for our entering students in the fall of 1993. The development of the new curriculum was the culmination of more than four years of collaborative effort that gathered insights and experience from corporate executives, Wharton graduates, recruiters, faculty, and students. This initial study, Wharton 2000, which assessed the current and future changing needs of managers, and design stage spanned two years, followed by two years of pilot-testing, evaluation, and refinement with our Wharton MBA students. Based on the study, the focus of our curricular redesign was to create a curriculum which draws upon the School's well-established strengths in specialized fields, while providing a greater breadth and depth of knowledge, and the integration and application of that knowledge across the curriculum. I am proud to say that our new MBA curriculum has proven its integrity and is received enthusiastically by our faculty, student, and recruitersțand it continues to provide the School with a basis for continuous refinement and innovation.

Wharton was the first school in the world to offer management education more than 100 years ago; however, MBA programs in general had not undergone substantial reform since the early 1960s. Our primary goal was to build on Wharton's traditional strengths in functional areas, while introducing more cross-functional perspectives and experience, important new areas of business knowledge, leadership training, and a comprehensive global management orientation. To achieve these goals, we needed to create new faculty teaching structures, develop strategies to engage faculty more intensely in our curricular innovation, plan new courses and support existing courses to be globally oriented, and implement mechanisms to continuously evaluate our progress. I would like to share with you some insights and knowledge that Wharton has gained -- our value-added -- through our MBA curricular innovation.

The first value-added we have experienced is a result of the significant investment of time and effort that innovation takes from a core group of faculty (see note 1) and administrators. Our desire to introduce more cross-functional perspectives and experience necessitated the creation of structured teaching teams for each of our core courses that span across our 12 cohorts (see note 2). We group three cohorts into a "cluster" and assign each cluster a faculty team leader whose role is to facilitate opportunities for faculty teams in each quarter (see note 3) and throughout the academic year to share ideas and cases, and integrate common course concepts and topics. Over the past five and a half years, we have seen many faculty teams working together to create cross-functional integration between their core courses. For example, this past fall semester our Operations Management: Quality and Productivity, Managerial Accounting, and the Management of People and Work (see note 4) courses shared several common cases and coordinated an on-site visit to local production facilities to demonstrate key concepts involved with the management of processes. Cross-functional integration requires changing the culturețbreaking down the walls of decentralized academic departments to encourage the marriage of ideas and concepts and foster learning across functions. Our new curriculum continues to promote such shared learning for our faculty and ultimately for our MBA students.

The second value-added, produced by the need to educate our MBA students to succeed in multinational and transnational organizations, is the opportunity for Wharton to design courses dedicated to international issues, new optional overseas studies programs, (see note 5) and the introduction of cases with global perspectives to our courses. The faculty have begun to draw upon our MBA student body, which represent 48 countries around the globe, for their personal and professional experiences. For example, in the ethics module of our Foundations of Leadership and Teamwork course, our students are engaged in discussions regarding global discrepancies in laws and living, leading to a debate of ethical competitive advantage verses unethical exploitation. The School has also developed programs for supporting globalization by targeting resources for faculty research on global issues.

The third area in which Wharton has gained a sense of value-added is through the implementation of mechanisms and performance measures which continuously evaluate our progress. Our community has joined together to create faculty-student committees, which meet on a bi-monthly basis, to refine existing core courses and brainstorm ideas about how to make things even better. We have also created a standing committee with members of our Board of Trustees and faculty to help us anticipate the needs of the global marketplace. The new curriculum has also shaped the design and delivery of services and support systems in the administrative offices of the Wharton Graduate Division as we seek to meet the needs of our MBA students. The establishment of technology tools to facilitate the new curriculum, student-initiated core teaching awards, and continued enrichment of our Pre-Term offerings (see note 6) including company tours, are just a few examples of how curricular innovation has gone beyond our classroom walls.

Curricular innovation at Wharton is an on-going process, as we strive to keep cultivating ideas about how to grow cross-functional integration and global perspectives. In a recent survey of our MBA students, 69% expressed the highest degree of satisfaction with our MBA Program. As we move forward, the key players continue to be faculty in the classroom, creating and teaching our MBA core courses. There are no short-cuts or "magic bullets" to curricular reformțit requires a deep and abiding commitment of the faculty. Our community is working together to develop and support a partnership for innovative change, building upon our position as a leader in management education.

Notes