HULT’s New One Year MBA Curriculum Wins AMBA’S 2014 Innovation Award

Hult International Business School beat 100 other schools to win the Association of MBAs’ (AMBA) 2014 MBA Innovation Award for their redesigned One-Year MBA curriculum.

AMBA is the international independent authority on postgraduate business education. Their accreditation service is the global standard for all MBA, DBA, and MBM programs, and they currently accredit over 200 business schools in more than 70 countries.

The AMBA MBA Innovation Award recognizes new practices, risks, and creativity in AMBA-accredited programs.  Hult’s new MBA curriculum, that saw them win the award, is the world’s first to be designed in collaboration with global business leaders and employers.

Hult says it redesigned its One-Year MBA curriculum to fully integrate the teaching of critical ‘soft skills’ and measure students’ development in a systematic and comprehensive way.  

Using five key competencies (Adaptive Thinking, Communication, Building Relationships, Teamwork, and Execution) identified by employers as essential to success in the workplace, MBA students work on improving these competencies throughout the program through a blend of training, mentorship, and feedback from peers, faculty, and professional development specialists.

One of the key changes introduced by the school includes spending less time on theoretical concepts, and more time applying those newly learned concepts. The school says on its website that now “more time (is spent) simulating what really happens in business, as well as how to react to ambiguous and changing situations.”

Andrew Main Wilson, AMBA Chief Executive, had this to say of Hult’s win: “The fact that Hult International Business School created an MBA program in close consultation with leading employers, designed to deliver performance-ready MBAs to make a major impact in their roles from day one, is both extremely impressive and much in tune with the needs of modern business.”

As per the B-School, the new MBA curriculum takes the action based learning approach to bold new levels by combining skills development and competitive simulations with a six-month-long ‘Hult Impact Challenge’ – a hands-on project working on current business challenges faced by multinationals such as IBM, Unilever, and Philips. 

The challenge also gives student opportunities to demonstrate their skills and experience directly to potential employers.

Besides HULT, Maastricht School of Management was shortlisted for its MBA program’s focus on taking the lessons of management education to ‘fragile states’ and countries lacking in resources. Meanwhile, Grenoble and Warwick were in the running for developing novel teaching methods for use within courses – a nanotech educative board game and a film-making assignment respectively.