The largest global business schools accreditation body has released a vision for the future of business education.

Juliane Iannarelli, vice-president for knowledge development at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), said that the idea for its Collective Vision for Business Education, arose from a realisation that business schools and other higher education institutions were ¡°surrounded by messages about their destruction in their industry and the urgency for change¡±.

¡°Many of these messages were being termed in a way that was somewhat threatening,¡± she said. ¡°We thought coordinated action [was] needed to increase ideas about what¡¯s next and where some of the biggest opportunities might be.¡±

The report, the result of several years' work drawing on the ¡°collective wisdom¡± of business and management education experts and the AACSB¡¯s 1,500 member schools, identified five specific roles that business schools are well poised to fulfil.

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They include being catalysts for innovation due to their role in fostering entrepreneurship; as co-creators of knowledge through interdisciplinary research; operating as hubs of lifelong learning; being "leaders on leadership" by striving for "new data-driven insights into effective leadership¡±; and being "enablers for global prosperity".

Ms Iannarelli said that the vision was not intended to be ¡°prescriptive¡± and they were ¡°building on existing areas of strength¡±.

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¡°These are not expectations of business schools where, as an accrediting body, we intend to evaluate the degree to which the schools have moved in these directions," she added.

¡°The ideas are sufficiently broad to allow for a lot of different interpretations based on the context those schools are in.¡±

She accepted that for some schools ¨C especially in countries with emerging economies ¨C a wholesale change of focus was ¡°not going to be easy¡±.

¡°If they¡¯re truly embraced, they do call for schools to think, organise and even act differently than they have in the past,¡± she said. But she added that for "more resource-constrained schools", the guidance could help by allowing "a clear sense of purpose to emerge".

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¡°Rather than trying to serve too many different missions, if a school identifies those areas of strength it wants to focus on, a lot of the vision gives them ideas as to how they might do that.¡±

Julia Clarke, dean of the Faculty of Business and Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, the most recent UK institution to gain accreditation from the AACSB, said that it was ¡°great to see the emphasis...on co-production of knowledge¡±.

¡°British business schools should be in an excellent position to implement AACSB¡¯s vision because we have a head start on the impact agenda ¨C not just thanks to [the research excellence framework] but also because of the partnership ethos that is typical of UK schools,¡± she said.

¡°International accreditors, in my experience, have tended to be hugely impressed by the way that UK schools cross the lines between the corporate and academic world.¡±

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john.elmes@tesglobal.com