At the same time BI hosted a broadly planned conference where Torger Reve and Amir Sasson presented their book “Et kunnskapsbasert Norge” (“A Knowledge-based Norway”). The conference was overbooked and well attended both by the media and profiled leaders from business and industry and from public administration. It was opened by Crown Prince Haakon. The conference showed BI at its best, and I was a very proud President sitting in the first row.
One of the main themes of the conference was closer relations and cooperation between education and the business community. Research-based education must be more strongly integrated with business, and business and industry must become part of research-based education to a larger degree. This is particularly important since education is supposed to contribute to necessary innovation.
For BI this is a perfect fit, since orientation towards business and industry is perhaps our most important strategic pillar. What is on the programme, then?
- We are further developing our internship schemes where the students take the elective part of their programme in an enterprise. We started this on a small scale in 2011, and more than 40 bachelor students took this opportunity, with good results. We were also able to introduce an experimental scheme for the Master of Science programmes. Here a much smaller number of students were involved, but this scheme will be further developed in the time to come. In this way education is brought into the enterprises. I believe this is the educational model of the future, and that spending a period of time in an enterprise will become a compulsory part of most study programmes.
- Already, BI has a large number of lecturers from business and industry. As much as one third of the teaching offered by BI is provided by persons who have permanent main positions outside BI. Not all of these come from business and industry, but many of them do. In this way the enterprises are entering education.
- Further and continuing education, or executive education as it is called in business school jargon, will be further strengthened. In that way we build relations with people who practice their profession, and our lecturers are able to include relevant themes from business and industry in their teaching in general.
The borders between education and working life are becoming less clear. Now, both academia and the enterprises have to demonstrate that this is something more than just fine words.
