i2i Challenge, Second Place: Dawn Iacobucci, “Every Student Creates a Business Plan”
Dawn Iacobucci doesn’t usually enter contests like this. As a professor as Vanderbilt University’s Owen School of Management, though, improving graduate management education, is something she thinks about a lot.
“I have been teaching MBAs for a long time and I care about their education and our ultimate impact on business,” she said.
Dawn’s idea would add a “thesis” element to graduate management education, requiring students to prepare a final business plan to “do something in the world better.” Students would begin thinking about their business plans from their first day in the program and incorporate what they learn along the way into the final proposal. Integrating business concepts into a plan wholly their own would embed those concepts more, Dawn said, than earning better grades.
She has wondered for a long time how to get students to take their MBA educational experience more seriously. Similarly, Dawn wants to signal to the outside world that business schools are rigorous and high intellect. This idea would challenge students to think creatively, view their courses from a practical perspective, and contribute to the world outside business school.
“We, the business education community produce some 500,000 MBAs a year,” she noted in her idea. “How wonderful it would be to produce 500,000 new ideas of how to make business and the world better, each year.” Even if only 1% of those ideas became reality, that’s still 5,000 informed, creative, thoughtful attempts to make something better each year.
Dawn’s idea would address a struggle she has observed in recent years around how to help students “put all their learning together and integrate the concepts from finance and marketing and ops.” To prepare this business “thesis” or proposal, and successfully defend it, students would do just that from start to finish.
Read more about Dawn’s idea on gmac.com.
Profiles of our final second-place duo will appear here next week!
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