The IMD campus in Lausanne, Switzerland
For the first time ever, the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) will allow executives to enroll in credit-bearing courses that can be stacked into two new Executive Master’s degree programs. The Executive Master in AI & Digital Business Transformation and the Executive Master in Sustainable Business Transformation are the first new degree programs at IMD in a quarter of a century.
The courses and the degrees are highly flexible, with multiple start dates. The courses are available on a blended basis, with both online and on-campus classes. They are fully modular, allowing students to shape the pace of their learning to fit personal and professional commitments. The part-time degrees can be completed in as little as 18 months or can be stretched out to a maximum time of five years. The target demographic for the programs is executives and managers with eight or more years of work experience.
The intro courses that can be stacked into one of the degrees is priced at CHF 11,000. Otherwise, prices vary based on the course. IMD has priced the full AI degree at CHF 70,000 or $79,330, payable in three installments, while the sustainability master’s would cost CHF 60,000 or $67,990.
‘BLOWING UP THE TRADITIONAL BOUNDARIES BETWEEN DEGREES & EXEC ED’
“We are blowing up the traditional boundaries between degrees and executive education,” IMD President David Bach tells Poets&Quants in an interview. “In a world in which people are looking for specialized skills and flexibility, we have this incredible portfolio of executive programs and we can configure them like a Lego set so that you can pick the pieces that are most essential to you and assemble them in a way that has the most impact.”
IMD President David Bach
Bach believes that IMD may well be the first major European business school to decouple courses from degrees in both bite-sized and meal-sized portions that can be applied to one of the two new degrees. “This is the first time IMD will allow people to take credit-bearing courses that can be stacked into a degree,” adds Bach. “We had to rethink this to get out of our own way and figure out how to do this. We leverage a lot of our blended and fully online offerings to meet learners where they are. Executives will get a certificate for every course they complete. When you have completed three of these courses and an assignment, you get a Certificate of Advanced Studies, a Swiss government-recognized credential.”
The early feedback from IMD’s corporate clients has been positive, says Bach. “We are very much in a world now where people try to communicate their achievements,” he explains. “We are earning badges all the time. The idea that we are credentialing these courses and you can stack them up resonates with the participants and with employers. A lot of what is happening in corporate learning is you accumulate these credentials. This is very much at the sweet spot for IMD for people who are working to acquire more technical skills combined with leadership skills.”
IMD will deliver the program through a combination of online and in-person sessions. “It is blended from the beginning,” says Bach. “Every single building block is blended. If you want to limit the in-person time as much as possible, you can probably limit it to three weeks on campus for sustainability or five weeks for digital transformation. That would be the minimum on-campus. Some of the courses are five days on campus; some are two and one-half days on campus and two and one-half in live virtual sessions. Some are six-week asynchronous courses.”
IMD’s EXECUTIVE MASTER’S IN SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
The full degree in Sustainable Business Transformation is composed of ten courses, including five core sustainable courses, three business transformation courses, and three or four electives chosen from a portfolio of options (see all components below). The core classwork ranges from AI Strategy and Implementation to Leading Digital Execution. A capstone project or thesis that allows participants to work on their own specific business challenges under the supervision of IMD faculty and expert mentors.
Components of IMD’s new Executive Master’s in Sustainable Business Transformation
IMD’s EXECUTIVE MASTER’S IN AI & DIGITAL BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
The AI degree program also boasts a similar format, with ten courses in the entire degree program (see chart below). There are five core sustainability courses, from Leading Sustainable Business Transformation to Leadership Skills for Sustainable Change; a trio of business transformation courses, electives tailored to a participant’s interests, and finally a capstone or thesis project.
Components of IMD’s new Executive Master’s In AI and Digital Business Transformation
“It is not only a design philosophy. It happens so often that someone takes a course and then says, ‘That was great. What’s next?’ Now they can accumulate a group of courses and convert them into a master’s degree. We may have people who come for AI Strategy and then realize there is a course on Building Digital Ecosystems or a course on Leading Digital Execution. When they take all three of them they can get the Swiss-recognized certificate.”
MORE EXECUTIVE MASTER OPTIONS LIKELY IN THE FUTURE AT IMD
Bach views the new programs as a potential start to additional options. “We have some preliminary designs of additional executive master’s that we can add in leadership, organizational change and transformation, and family business for which we are known. Once you eliminate that barrier between degree and executive education, there are all kinds of programs, you can craft others from this model.”
Bach, who assumed his leadership role at IMD eight months ago, says he has been thinking about innovation in management education for a long time. “I am really excited about this because this is part of a broader effort to underscore just how important executive education is,” he says. “The institutions that I know well are very degree- and research-focused. Executive education is something they do on the side. It is not an important part of a school’s mission.
“At IMD, we look at it differently. The number of practicing managers and people in leadership positions is much greater than the number of people who are starting out by earning a master’s degree. And there is so much change in the world that it has got to be an important role for a business school. This isn’t paying lip service to life-long learning. This is making executive development the core of your activity to have an outsized impact. We will create lots of value for our learners and our communities. But we are also doing something in management education that at IMD we have always tried to do: be a bit disruptive and bolder.”
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