Business Education as it Should Be

Innovation at the Heart of Technology, Pedagogy, & Business Model

We’re an abductive organization, thinking big thoughts about the future of work and business education, deducing what we need to do to make it happen. We also tinker with new technologies, pedagogies, human-centered design, and education’s old business models. We induce the implications of our experiments and design ways to put our solutions to use more broadly. Think Tank + Tinker Lab = Deductive | Inductive | Abductive.

We’re also holistic educators, developing head, heart, and hands, including deep skills — those that remain key human capabilities despite surface skills that become obsolete, jobs that disappear, and new work appearing that we never imagined before.

Our skyline isn’t next year or the next 5 or 10. We’re envisioning what the world will be like in 2050, what education means in that context, and how to create at least a little 2050 today.

THINK TANK

Technologists, Business Strategists, and Designers & humanists

envisioning the future of Business Education:

Dr. CJ Meadows

Think Tank Chair, DBA Harvard Business School

Technologist, Designer, Business Strategist, Innovation & Design Thinking Expert

DR. TAL BEN-SHAHAR

Founder, Happiness Studies Academy, using advanced technologies and the Science of Happiness to develop organizational and community leaders. Best-selling author who taught Harvard’s most popular course — on Happiness

PETA LATIMER

CEO, Mercer Singapore

Future-of-Work expert creating and sustaining healthy, wealthy, & talented workforces

JACK SIM

Failed his O-Levels, failed his A-levels, couldn’t go to university. So, he founded 16 successful businesses, 6 social enterprises, became an artist, has been to Harvard 4 times, & was invited to teach at Singularity U

BRIAN LING

Design Director, Design Sojourn

Award-winning design leader passionate in helping companies make people's lives better with design-led innovation. Co-Founder of cutting-edge Design-practice education company Methodology.sg

DR. EDY GREENBLATT

President, Execu-Care

One of the world’s top 100 coaches, resilience pioneer, high-tech startup founder, & serial entrepreneur

MANOJ MENON

Entrepreneur, Coach, Consultant

Formerly Sr. Partner, Frost & Sullivan, analyzing technology, future trends, & business model innovation

DR. ASLI TOKSAL

Sr. Sustainability Mgr., Siemens

Currently on world-tour learning & speaking about the Future of Work. Leader of sustainable business

SO-YOUNG KANG

Founder & CEO, Gowbe | CEO, Awaken Group

Former McKinsey consultant now leading micro/mobile ed.tech & a consulting group innovating at the intersection of strategy, marketing, & design

PAUL BRADLEY

Chairman & CEO, Caprica Int’l.

Serial entrepreneur & CEO mentor, fostering innovation ecosystem & high-tech start-ups. MBA in International Management, Thunderbird School of Global Management. Disruptive business & tech-transformation expert

JIN KANG MØLLER

VP (Experience Design & Group Customer Experience) & Founder (Great Design Masterclass), OCBC

Author, Designful.co, triggering meaningful conversations with designers, artists, & business leaders on the role of design in the business

DR. CHRIS MARSHALL

AVP Big Data, Analytics, & AI at IDC, DBA Harvard Business School

Formerly with Watson Financial Services at IBM. FinTech expert, startup mentor, AI pioneer, & lifelong learner

TINKER LAB

Here’s a Few Current Projects We’re Tinkering With:

Watson-coached personalized & adaptive learning

Why take classes in what you already know? With adaptive-learning technology, you can not only “test out of” entire courses but also reduce the time within a course on what you already know or have learned quickly during the course. In fact, wouldn’t it be great if you could have your very own teacher/coach guiding you, recommending helpful materials, and assessing you when you’re ready? Watson has already been shown to be a very effective teacher — and an empathetic one.

MICRO-CREDENTIALING, MOBILE- & MICRO-LEARNING

Instead of leaving work & life to get an education, why not integrate life, learning, and work on-the-go? With a micro-credentialing approach, what you want (or need) to learn can be certified on its own. Additional learning can be suggested by your Watson coach, with special attention to microcredentials that combine to form a macrocredential — a personalized degree. With a micro-learning approach — bite-sized learning you can absorb every day — you can integrate life and learning and join an online/offline community of learners. We’ve already uploaded a new non-degree micro-course based on our recent management research on the “next wave” of innovation. “High-Impact Innovation: 30 Creative Leaders Who Built Tomorrow” is available on our favorite mobile-micro-learning platform: Gnowbe.

PSYCHO-NEURO ADMISSIONS/CAREER COUNSELING

Wouldn’t it be great if you could know how your brain is “wired” and whether you’re wired to be successful in one career or another? Actually, you can, and with a host of psycho-neuro and other types of tests, we can help you understand yourself like never before, shaving years of experimentation off of your career, targeting from the start various types of work you’re already designed to do.

BIOMETRIC WORKSHOPS

Authenticity, emotional intelligence, and connectedness with others are essential to your effectiveness as a leader and a human worker. Wouldn’t it be great to map your state of being with what you’re doing and how effective you are in the moment? With biometric tracking and feedback, you can see your state of being, adjust, track again, and analyze your synchrony with others — real-time and near-real-time feedback for effective self-development.

AUGMENTED-REALITY TEACHING & MIXED-REALITY LEARNING

It isn’t always possible to remember the name and detailed development history of hundreds of students. However, when a teachable moment occurs with someone in front of you, wouldn’t it be great to have your own coach telling you who they are and what they need? The expert teacher can take it from there, with a little help. On the learner’s side, wouldn’t it be great when touring a business or cultural-heritage site to have an electronic coach update you with key information so you can ask questions while an expert is at-hand? Or show you the way things used to be or will be when a project is finished, so you can probe further for issues and possibilities?

Here’s something already in use at our parent organization, S P Jain School of Global Management — Engaged Learning Online, whereby students around the world gather in a virtual classroom. We also have ELC’s (Engaged Learning Classrooms), where students enter without their distracting laptops & phones and instead use tablets installed at each seat to take cloud-stored notes, engage in virtual team breakouts, take polls, give feedback, ask questions anonymously, record bits of lecture they “zoned out” or want to review later (e.g. special instructions), and more.

And here’s a vision of the future, created over 30 years ago. Every piece of technology existed back then (except the seamless screen). Why isn’t this “normal” today? We’d like to make it normal and create the next vision…

OUR EXPERTS IN TECHNOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, EDUCATION, AND MORE — MAKING THE FUTURE HAPPEN TODAY:

DR CJ MEADOWS

edTech tinkerer, human-centered designer, & business model igniter

DEBASHIS GUHA

Founder & Managing Partner, Big Sky Quantitative Research, applying machine learning to business & economics

HAGIT BEN-ARI

Psychotherapist, Counsellor, Life
Coach, & Neuro-Linguistic
Programming facilitator

DAVID ARTLETT

CEO Coach, Communications Consultant, & Media Persoality

AMI MEHTA

Accreditation Expert, Financial Services Leader, Business Process Engineer, & Executive Training Designer

Reviewers/Contributors

Members of our growing community we’d like to thank include the following, for their review & contribution to our ideas & experiments:

ASHWIN SINHA

Partner & Head of Data at KPMG, Sydney. Senior leader with focus on strategy, large-scale data management & analytics, cognitive automation, emerging technologies, and digital transformation.