Look past the glossy brochures, soaring mission statements, and slick global rankings. Strip away the triple accreditations, exchange programs, and EMBA alliances. What are you left with? In most cases, a small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME).
Here’s the hard truth: over 80% of the world’s business schools operate with the resources and structures of SMEs — while competing in a market that expects them to perform like global corporations. This structural-market mismatch isn’t just a quirk of academia. It’s one of the biggest strategic blind spots in management education today.
SME IN STRUCTURE, ‘GLOCAL’ IN AMBITION
Consider the typical business school outside the top 50 globally. Most operate with:
- Fewer than 100 full-time faculty
- Modest marketing budgets
- Risk-averse governance structures
- Reliance on tuition and/or public funding
They are lean, local institutions. Innovation is often incremental. Decision-making is centralized. Change frequently moves at the speed of committee consensus. Resources are thin. And yet, these schools are asked to play on a global stage.
Today, even mid-tier institutions recruit international students, chase rankings, offer joint degrees, and build partnerships from São Paulo to Shanghai. They proudly adopt the “glocal” label — rooted in local ecosystems but aiming for global impact.
This dual identity isn’t inherently flawed. In fact, SME-style schools can have a major advantage: proximity to the market. Like nimble businesses responding to local customer needs, these institutions are often deeply in tune with regional employers, skills gaps, and labor market shifts. That responsiveness can be a strategic asset.
But there’s a catch. Programs shaped for local relevance don’t always translate into global competitiveness. Graduates may be well-prepared for regional industries but less equipped to navigate international careers. This is a trade-off few business schools openly acknowledge, yet it defines much of their reality.
A STRATEGIC TENSION THAT HURTS
This tension — between SME capabilities and global ambitions — plays out across nearly every function of the school:
- Budgets are tight. Unlike top-tier institutions with diversified revenue streams and billion-dollar endowments, most schools must deliver digitally enabled, globally relevant education on shoestring budgets
- Brand-building remains local, even as student recruitment becomes global. Digital marketing teams are small. Reputation hinges on rankings, which often fail to capture regional relevance or pedagogical innovation
- Faculty systems are bureaucratic. Hiring is slow. Incentives are misaligned. Schools expect cutting-edge research, industry engagement, and global teaching – but often provide limited support to achieve it
- Curriculum development lags behind market needs. Updating a course can take years. Meanwhile, students expect timely, interdisciplinary content — on AI, sustainability, digital business, and beyond
- Technology infrastructure is fragmented. Many schools struggle with outdated systems, even as digital-native learners demand seamless, mobile-first academic experiences
- Partnerships tend to stay local. Building international alliances takes time, trust, and capacity – three things that can’t be willed into existence overnight
The result is a constant balancing act: business schools striving for global credibility with SME-style operations, local constraints, and narrowly defined success metrics. It’s not that they lack ambition — but we ask business schools to run a global race with a local toolkit. It’s like taking a masterfully run local theater company on a world tour: highly skilled, deeply rooted, but not equipped for the demands of a global stage.
THE CASE FOR STRATEGIC REALIGNMENT
Rather than chasing the elite-school playbook, it’s time for most business schools to embrace their SME nature — acting with the agility, creativity, and customer focus that define the world’s most successful small and medium-sized enterprises.
One compelling example is Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) in Sweden. Despite its modest size — about 100 full-time faculty — JIBS has made significant strides by acting like a smart, agile SME. It has built a globally recognized brand rooted in entrepreneurship, ownership, and renewal, while staying deeply connected to the regional business ecosystem of Småland, home to Sweden’s SME heartland.
Currently, JIBS is undertaking a full overhaul of its program portfolio using a modular design. By building reusable course components and cross-program integration points, the school aims to speed up program development cycles and respond more nimbly to shifting market demands. It’s a textbook SME move: optimizing internal capabilities to better meet external challenges.
5 MOVES FOR SME-STYLE SCHOOLS TO THRIVE
- Act Like a Startup
Innovation doesn’t require massive investment. Launch fast, test ideas, learn, iterate. Retire outdated programs. Create space for experimentation, especially at the edges.
- Invest in Strategic Niches
Don’t compete with the giants across the board. Own a distinctive domain. Be it family business, regional development, sustainability, or entrepreneurial ecosystems.
- Build Smart Partnerships
SMEs scale through networks. So should business schools. But traditional accreditation networks, while important for legitimacy, rarely offer the focused collaboration schools need. Their scope is too broad, their agendas too generalized. Instead, schools should form or join purpose-built networks at the program level. These smaller alliances enable faculty exchange, joint teaching modules, and shared curriculum development.
At JIBS, for example, faculty and staff participate in collaborations within the European University Initiative, and new program-level initiatives are being investigated – leveraging JIBS’s core strength in entrepreneurship while drawing on partners’ unique assets. This gives us access to cross-border faculty pools and co-designed teaching experiences — agile moves that accreditation consortia simply aren’t built for. Through focused partnerships, SME-style schools can create educational experiences they’d never achieve alone.
- Empower Intrapreneurs
Your best change agents may already work for you. Flatten hierarchies. Reward initiative. Give faculty, staff, and students room to lead internal transformation.
At JIBS, a series of dean’s open office hours during a recent strategic overhaul created exactly that kind of opening. The invitation was simple: just show up — no agenda. Pitch ideas. Share frustrations. Challenge assumptions. The outcome was anything but ordinary: previously untapped energy and creativity surfaced across the school, helping identify new champions for transformation and unlocking momentum from within.
- Think Digital from the Core
Don’t treat digital as a teaching tool — it’s a strategic mindset. From admissions to alumni, redesign the entire student journey for a mobile, always-connected generation.
OWN THE IDENTITY — DON’T APOLOGIZE FOR IT
Most business schools will never become INSEAD or Wharton. And they don’t need to. What they need is a different model: one that plays to their strengths. Agility. Proximity to stakeholders. Strategic focus. The ability to listen closely and respond rapidly.
If SME-style schools embrace that identity, they can thrive — not by mimicking the elite, but by delivering deeply relevant, high-impact education on their own terms.
And isn’t that what business education should do?
Prepare people to lead not just anywhere, but somewhere. To make a difference not just at scale, but in substance.
Martin Wallin is the Dean of JIBS Jönköping International Business School in Sweden. Benjamin Stevenin is former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education.
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