Ahead of others: IBR

IBR starts its third re-accreditation with German, Austrian and Swiss industries in February. Looking at the present discussion in the US and how leading business schools try to reinvent their MBAs, we in IBR realize that we have been ahead of others for a long time. With the IBR method, now tested in Europe, Asia and Africa, we accumulated in depth pedagogical and content related insight over more than 10 years

Today, Standford Business School identifies the pedagogy and content as a problem in current MBA programmes. They want to introduce small tutoring groups and allow student to discuss current business issues. The idea of Standford was to train them to think critically about their business performance. (see Bradshaw, 2009:online) In IBR tutoring and consultation sessions have been a key concept since the IBR MBA was first accredited in 1999. The whole IBR concept roots in applying theory to current business issues at the student's workplace and to discuss decision making options critically during tutoring sessions. In addition, IBR never enrolled 40 or 60 students into one MBA group, but deliberately kept groups small.

Professor Henry Mintzberg of McGill in Canada and INSEAD in France believes that the case method which is most widely used by the most prominent business schools teaches decision making that is inappropriate to the younger generation of managers. Even Harvard Business School professors acknowledge that "the case study method and its role in 'developing 'arrogant' students' was one of the concerns raised by faculty as Harvard began its months of soul-searching."(Bradshaw, 2009:online) We are proud in IBR that we never built our MBA on this widely used concept of case studies. Since the late 1990s, our students learn how to make decisions in an environment that is well known to them. Their case is their own organization. By that, discussions are not theoretical, but they have a direct impact of the students' organizations and the students' day to day work.

Bibliography: Bradshaw, D. 2009. Reinventing the MBA. Online. Available from http://www.ft.com, accessed 07.02.2010
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