New kid on the block

Source: Technology Digital

Date :5/31/2007 3:47:52 PM

Cambridge University’s management school and its global MBA program, at age 17, is one of the newest in the western world.

By John O'Hanlon

The Judge Institute of Management Studies (named after Sir Paul Judge, who donated £8 million towards its foundation) was established in 1990 from the teaching work previously carried out in the Cambridge University Engineering Department.

The school always had plenty going for it. By 1990, Cambridge University was already at the centre of a technology revolution which became known as the Cambridge Phenomenon, and saw the development of a nexus of high tech companies, many of them spun out of university research.

"The Judge Business School has achieved extraordinary success in a very short period of time,” Professor De Meyer says. “The Cambridge MBA programme is ranked among the best in the world, distinguished by the innovative, international and collaborative ethos that makes Cambridge such a unique and exciting place to discover and learn.”

At the time of De Meyer first coming on board, the school was ranked 35th in the Financial Times MBA league table: by the time the 2007 results were out, and Prof De Meyer had taken up his post, the JBS had leapt to 15th place, leapfrogging the Said Business School at Oxford and making it one of the three UK, and one of only seven non-USA, MBA institutions in the top 20.

A network of resources

Not that league tables should be taken too seriously, De Meyer cautions, as he points out the three big differences between the JBS and other schools.

“INSEAD, like the LBS, is a stand-alone business school. It is not in the framework of a university,” DeMeyer explains.

That distinction gives it strategic independence without having to take a university into account, DeMeyer says. But on the other hand, being part of a world class university such as Cambridge means that you can call in people who can contribute to understanding of what is happening in management, but are not necessarily management specialists – such as economists to talk about macroeconomics for example, or engineers to talk about global warming. Some of the school’s programmes are even run jointly with other departments.

“I see the JBS as a place where we can network and interact with one another, where we can bring executives and management students together with people from all over the university,” says De Meyer.

Then again, INSEAD is a very large school with more than 900 MBA students, compared with the JBS’s 100.

“I expect we will grow it a little but it will always be one of the smaller schools. I’d say it has a much more collaborative style,” De Meyer says. “While we offer all of the tools that a person needs to be an MBA graduate in terms of finance, marketing and the like, at the same time we help people to work in networks and groups.”

Appropriately enough for an institution based in a former hospital, Prof De Meyer says he thinks business education has some similarities with medical training.

“If you want to be a surgeon you have to practice on live patients. We want to grow the number of bespoke programmes we run for outside companies, not so much because of the money it could bring in, as to be able to interact with business,” De Meyer says.

New kid on an old block

What tempts a scholar such as De Meyer to new pastures after 23 years closely identified with the growth of a major European institution like INSEAD? The challenge spoke to his entrepreneurial instincts, he says.

“Cambridge University may be one of the world’s oldest, but the JBS is one of the newest business schools, with unique resources to build on, and room to grow,” De Meyer says. “Then again, I had never really worked in a university-based business school. I was intrigued to find out what it was like to interact with people in different disciplines.”

As a Fellow of Jesus College he now has plenty of scope for interdisciplinary networking: “I am discovering the duality of an 800-year-old university that is nevertheless resolutely oriented towards the future. That has 50 Nobel Prize winners – is at the top in science and technology, and is also resolutely facing the future!”

Cambridge is a hotbed of innovation, and this excites him too, De Meyer says. The JBS is able to draw on the spirit that grew high tech companies such as Autonomy, Domino Printing Services and ARM through the MBA course itself and networking opportunities, he points out.

“To respond to the needs of the local community we basically have three routes,” De Meyer says. “First, at the beginning of the academic year MBA students have an entrepreneurial consulting project, basically a two week project working in groups with a local company. There is a client, they need to deliver something, and it has to be good!”

Meetings of minds

“Secondly, the school has a centre for entrepreneurial learning (CEL) which is a service for the whole of the university, showing them what it is to be an entrepreneur, how to create a business plan, how to create financing and so on,” De Meyer says.

On ‘Enterprise Tuesdays’ entrepreneurs such as Julie Meyer (an INSEAD graduate and founder of First Tuesday and Ariadne Capital), Karan Bilmoria (Founder of Cobra Beer) and the serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Hermann Hauser come to the Engineering Department to share their experience with members of the university and the local business community.

“Thirdly, we include a compulsory course in the MBA on the management of innovation,” De Meyer continues. “Innovation is a very difficult issue because true innovation always entails risk, and there is no certainty that all innovations will go right. Companies have to learn to live with the failures. We can’t teach them to avoid all failures, only how to increase their chances of success. For every innovation that worked in business there were always many that didn’t!”

The MBA students spend a lot of time in the real world of business. As well as the entrepreneurial consulting programme already referred to, they go in groups into large organisations for the five or six weeks of the Easter vacation, and in the summer they have a third individual project, which may be an internship or a research project.

Understanding the knowledge-based company

Criticism has been levelled against many American business schools that they concentrate too much on the functional aspects of management education – the how rather than the why. Indeed, there has been a move to redress this at some of the top schools.

“I have a lot of admiration for the best of the American business schools,” says de Meyer. “They don’t lead the global ratings by accident.”

But Meyer says too often, “the traditional American model is one of command and control through the financial figures. I’d be the last person to say that the finances are not important — you need to manage though performance indicators — but I think we are shifting toward the world where people work in global networks of knowledge workers where command and control doesn’t work any more, and I think the JBS prepares people for that sort of a world. We are fortunate that we are in Cambridge where the knowledge component is so blatant. We have a collaborative model, where networking is so important, and we have such a global bunch here.”

Cambridge University has developed close links with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (coincidently, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts), something that also benefits JBS, for example through an MPhil min Technology Policy, entirely built on the experience of MIT. The Management of Technology and Innovation programme is run jointly by the JBS and the Faculties of Science and Engineering, and the school’s Centre for competitiveness and Innovation was built with the help of ongoing work at MIT.

“There are a lot more informal contacts; colleagues know one another and are flying back and forth all the time, Energy for example – people from here work with colleagues at MIT on energy security,” De Meyer says.

De Meyer also notes that he was astonished to find a group of energy specialists on the staff.

“It is a good example of what is unique about the JBS Normally you would not find that in a business school. This is another advantage of being at the heart of Cambridge. Energy, corporate governance, economics, languages – we have access here to resources that no standalone business school could hope to provide,” De Meyer says.

Don’t neglect the basics, De Meyer concludes.

“When I talk about globalisation and networking, remember that students need a strong background in the tools of management, and our programme is designed to give them that. But then you have to put the building blocks together, and that is where I think globalisation, collaboration and networking are so important,” he says.