Connecting Students and Firms to Win in Emerging Markets: The Master in Relations with Eastern Countries

Professional schools for business, medicine, engineering, and law are established in order to produce research and teaching that are relevant for practice. Despite concerns that practitioners often fail to adopt the findings of research (Van de Ven, 2007), there is very little doubt that a training in medicine, engineering, or law is essential in order to be a physician, an engineer, or a lawyer. The same, however, cannot be said for business. In fact, not only has the gap between management science and practice been widening more than in other professional schools, making academic research less useful for solving practical managerial problems (Bartunek et al., 2001), but even the teaching in business schools seems to be of little use for managerial practice (Rubin & Dierdorff, 2009), leading some to claim that ‘the only business that could seem to benefit would be the business school business!’ (Murray, 1988: 71). Another convincing argument is that teaching in business schools can even be very harmful for managerial practice (Mintzberg, 2004). The most enlightening proposals for innovative teaching that is relevant for practice are enlisting co-teaching courses where one of the instructors is an executive or former executive, hiring colleagues with professional experience, encouraging clinical, qualitative research and case studies (Pfeffer, 2007), and creating development activities to improve the practice of management (Mintzberg, 2004). These latter activities have been qualified as the ‘experiential learning’ approach in education, and the effectiveness of the approach has been proved empirically (Nadkarni, 2003).