World-class programme

A United States leader in interdisciplinary studies has judged the Auckland Institute of Technology's integrated business studies approach as one of the best he has seen anywhere.

Professor William Newell, professor of interdisciplinary studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, said AIT is well ahead of US business schools in its interdisciplinary approach to business education.

Even Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which was ranked by the US News and World Report as the top business specialty school in the US, only offered one integrated management core and developed a limited set of competencies through separate programmes, he said. But neither the Babson courses, nor any others of which he was aware, were as well conceived as the New Zealand programme.

Professor Newell, who made a week-long visit to AIT earlier this year, said an interdisciplinary approach was rapidly being adopted in a business environment becoming increasingly more complex, especially through internationalisation.

"Business opportunities are determined by the interaction of changing social, political, economic, cultural and technological forces which operate according to different principles and follow different logics," Professor Newell said in his report back to AIT.

"Businesses are responding to that complexity more and more by the formation of cross-functional teams which bring together diverse perspectives such as marketing, management, law, economics, finance, accounting, computing, design engineering and sales to solve complex business problems."

An interdisciplinary approach, Professor Newell said, encourages business people to seek out alternative perspectives, develop mental flexibility to shift across those perspectives, consider their comparative advantages, challenge assumptions and expose contextual differences. It also provided strategies for creating the common ground for a solution. Business education needed to become interdisciplinary too, if it was to prepare future members of those cross-functional teams and future business executives.

"Since students will use knowledge from the social sciences as well as from other business disciplines in the interdisciplinary context of real-world business, it makes sense to teach using an interdisciplinary approach," Professor Newell said.

One of the other remarkable things he found about AIT was that the integrated business studies approach was not just tacked on to an essentially discipline-based structure. Instead, it was at the centre of the bachelor of business studies programme organisationally as well as curricularly.

"To the best of my knowledge, no school or college of business in the US has so thoroughly dislodged the disciplines from a position of dominance, which may explain why interdisciplinary approaches to business education in the US are so rare," he said.

Professor Newell encouraged AIT to spread information about its programme through international conferences. Once its staff became better known, they should be offered as consultants and provide workshops on interdisciplinary education throughout the world, he said.

Des Graydon, dean of the faculty of business at AIT, is delighted with the excellent report.