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Abstract

Over the past three decades, several industries including newspapers, broadcasting, book publishing and selling, music, movie, travel, financial services, and now the automobile industry have been disrupted by entrepreneurs using innovative business models based on lean and customizable technologies. Business schools have celebrated and promoted these developments, producing books, articles, and case studies documenting the profound changes that have occurred. Currently, the worlds of higher education in general and business education in particular are themselves facing disruption in much the same way as other industries. Paradoxically, however, the established incumbents in the B-school world have remained committed to a high-cost business model that served them well in the second half of the past century but that has disconnected their faculties, to a large extent, from the real world of business practice and that may be compromising their future adaptation and survival. This article reviews this rapidly changing landscape by identifying a number of disruptive trends in higher education, discussing a set of challenges that are specific to business education, and articulating two possible scenarios for the future of business schools, namely variation and selection.

Keywords

disruption higher education business education

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