Brown U. collaborates on unique MBA program

Brown University is joining the list of local colleges and universities offering a master’s degree in business administration, but professor Angus Kingon says Brown’s offering will be unlike any other, both locally and internationally.
The Ivy League school is teaming with Instituto de Empresa, an elite European business school, to launch a 15-month executive MBA program that will mix business management with the humanities and social, biological and physical sciences.
Kingon, co-director of Brown’s innovation management and entrepreneurship program who helped develop the MBA program, said its design was a response to complaints in some circles that traditional MBA programs are outdated in a quickly changing world. He agrees with that assessment.
“I don’t think the MBA has truly risen to the occasion,” said Kingon, who is also a professor of entrepreneurship and organizational studies and an engineering professor. “[This new offering] will not be cookie-cutter.”
The mix of Instituto de Empresa’s business courses and Brown’s liberal arts offerings will result in “nuanced and contextual rich” MBA coursework that will better prepare students for a complex global economy, Kingon added.
The program, due to start in spring 2011, will also feature a mix of online lessons with face-to-face classroom courses that participants will be required to attend at the campuses of both schools.
Students will graduate with a degree from Instituto de Empresa, known as IE, a highly regarded private university with campuses in Madrid and Segovia.
Five Rhode Island schools already have executive MBA programs with tuitions as high as $30,000 that allow working students to attend on a part-time basis. Most of the programs attract businesspeople from Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut.
By contrast, the Brown-IE program is expected to have a global reach, according to David Bach, dean of IE Business School programs and professor of strategy and economic environment.
“We do, however, believe that it will probably attract more students from the United States and parts of Latin America and Western Europe than, say, Asia for example,” Bach said in an e-mail response to questions. “The more diversity, the better.”
Another difference: Tuition for the full Brown-IE program has been set at $95,000.
Officials at both schools said the MBA program is designed for executives with more than 10 years of experience. The program will accept as many as 35 MBA candidates in the first year, and Kingon said he hoped it would attract Brown alumni who might have eventually ended up attending Harvard Business School. The MBA program is the result of a joint agreement between IE and Brown that was signed last year. Both schools have said they are exploring other ways of partnering, such as with research and faculty and student exchanges.
While Brown offers a business-economics concentration and a master’s degree in innovation management and entrepreneurship, the local university is one of only two Ivy League schools that do not have a business school, the other being Princeton.
Indeed, Kingon said Brown wasn’t looking to offer an MBA when administrators first started looking at a strategic partnership with a school abroad a few years back. It was only after talking with IE officials, who were looking to collaborate with a prestigious U.S. school, that the idea gained momentum.
“It seemed to make sense,” Kingon said.
Brown and IE said the core MBA courses still will examine management styles and insights through real-life case studies.
While there will be an online component, MBA candidates will attend four courses in Providence – for one or two weeks at a time – and one course in Madrid.
This isn’t the first time IE has teamed with another prestigious school for an MBA program.
Bach said IE collaborates with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in both full-time and executive MBA programs. There also is a partnership between IE and the Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago.
“But for this particular program, we were really interested in working with a nonbusiness school,” Bach said. “And this is what makes this collaboration so innovative and unique.”
“We also complement one another really nicely,” he said. “Brown is very strong in undergraduate and doctoral education, whereas IE’s main strength is the professional master’s segment. IE is a leading international business school, whereas Brown is one of only two Ivy League [schools] that don’t have a business school. … But Brown is famous for its liberal arts ethos and world-renowned for its expertise in the humanities, social science, and engineering and applied science – precisely the areas that we want to bring into management education.” •