Biz Schools should aim for Distinctiveness in Industry or Function

Biz School Best Practice: Key Takeaways, PART 3
By George ILIEV, #RepurposeEducation

The best marketing and recruiting strategy for a business school is to be distinctive in at least one dimension that matters: to stand out above the others with an industry or business function specialisation.

A rule of thumb in achieving business school distinctiveness is to aim to develop it in a specific industry or a well-defined functional area, e.g. aerospace, healthcare, social entrepreneurship or digital marketing. These areas are a lot more impactful than seeking distinctiveness in fuzzier areas such as pedagogy. Schools often view as a pedagogical innovation the use of local case studies or teaching with live company cases but these are hardly unique nowadays. Anything that can realistically make it into the headlines of the business media can be a source of distinctiveness: if it is interesting enough for a newspaper headline, it will be distinctive enough.

Aligning faculty behind a distinctiveness strategy is not easy as there are always trade-offs: more research on aerospace companies means less research on banks, for example. Yet, the tail of the peacock can teach us all a powerful lesson: if it were a mix of all colours in equal doses, it would be uniformly black.

Peacock tail
(image source: Wikipedia)

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