QUT Collaboration With MIT Sloan Gives MBA Program the ‘Cutting Edge’

QUT Business School has collaborated with the MIT Sloan School of Management to immerse MBA students in a ground-breaking entrepreneurship and innovation program. 

Every year, a total of 60 QUT MBA, EMBA, and Digital MBA students get an opportunity to take part in a two week immersion program with the prominent MIT Sloan School of Management. 

The lectures are delivered by the distinguished faculty of MIT Sloan, who mainly focus on creating awareness and developing best practice capability in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Digital Transformation. 

Due to the pandemic, the immersion program was held online, but the motive is to make the students immerse at MIT Sloan’s Cambridge campus at Massachusetts in the US in the coming future. 

One of the senior lecturers from QUT’s Business School, Graham Fellows expressed his interest saying that the collaboration was an exciting opportunity for both management schools. 

The collaboration is jointly advantageous, which permits both schools to advance their management education. While the MIT Sloan are experts in their field, QUT’s Business School is still in the learning process, focusing on the content and the way MIT Sloan delivers the lectures, Fellow said. 

Further, the MIT Sloan, in return, gets a unique global perspective by delivering their program and how to iterate and innovate for the upcoming generation. It will be an amazing culmination for the students, where they can easily apply all the theory they've learned from various units in a challenging context, overseen by MIT. 

During the immersion program, participants will get access to academic coaches and entrepreneurship mentors, who will assist and guide their learnings from MIT Sloan and QUT.

QUT Business School has partnered with the MIT Sloan faculty to cover a range of contemporary topics based on primary areas including, 

• Entrepreneurial practice
• Adaptive Leadership Framework
• Digital Platforms
• Sustainability / Circular Economy
• Business Model Transformation
• Future of Work
• Data Analytics and Data Driven Decisions
• Innovation Process
• Digital Transformation Tools.

The participants will gain access to the prestigious MIT Sloan Affiliate Network, after the successful completion of the programme and graduation from QUT Business School. 

Zoe Davies, Deputy Chief Executive Officer at Digga, a family-run company specialising in manufacturing heavy earthmoving equipment, says that the QUT MIT Immersion program highlighted the key entrepreneurial insights. 

Ms Davies said that it was only because of the immersion program, she was able to understand the key features of entrepreneurship. As she wasn't the founding member of her company, she didn't consider herself as an entrepreneur. 

Talking about the misconception of entrepreneurship, she said that the founders are considered as the entrepreneur, whereas the following leaders continue their legacy. 

Davies said that with the help of the immersion program, she understood that being an entrepreneur is less about a title and more about a frame of mind.

Further, she considers Entrepreneurship to be capable of changing the scope of a business to fulfil the challenges and seize the opportunities in future. 

As for Digga, the legacy of the family business as a platform to continue other paths can be used, which can potentially create a new business or a new product.

Zoe said that the QUT MIT immersion program gave her the cutting edge skills and insights to an entrepreneur within her own business

One of the fellow participants of the QUT MIT immersion program, Francis Carroll, An asset manager, APA Group, a leading energy infrastructure company, said that the immersion program involved developing a start-up concept that was also pitched to the MIT lecturers.

Mr Carroll said that only by doing so, one can learn and understand, allowing them to apply it in the real world. The quality of the immersion program was commendable as most of the lectures had a fantastic experience, where they launched and scaled start-ups. 

The MIT and QUT immersion program offered a really good program featuring different speciality domains like entrepreneurship and innovation that was also integrated with the real world. 

Earlier, a global webinar series, the Future Enterprise was presented by MIT Sloan School of Management and QUT Business School which discovered the future of business, enterprise, and entrepreneurship. 

In the three-part webinar series, the current attributes, challenges, and opportunities were examined by the experts in business, leadership, transformation and entrepreneurship. 

Meanwhile, the next QUT Executive MBA program has been scheduled to commence from January 2022.