Teaching Innovation Program

At the Rotman School, we have significantly revised our curriculum, moving towards a program that emphasizes "integrative thinking" rather than a primarily case-based or functional approach. Future business leaders are taught how to think about the whole organization rather than the parts. In keeping with this approach, we would like to focus on the big picture and not on subsets of sustainability (e.g., specific social issues or impacts, or specific approaches such as stakeholder relations).

Our goal will be to develop a useful model for business leadership in a sustainable global society. Such a model will provide the basis for an improved curriculum for current and future business leaders, including students, alumni and other members of the business community.

Clearly, this is no small task. To do this, we will engage senior faculty, staff and business leaders to conduct new research, hold seminars and conferences with academics and executives, and develop new curricular content and materials. These activities will be carried out leveraging our related networks and assets, including the AIC Institute for Leadership, the CCMF Center for Integrative Thinking, the Clarkson Center for Business Ethics & Board Effectiveness, and with the involvement of our students, alumni and the business community. We also look forward to learning from, and working with, the other members of the Aspen Institute's TIP network in the development of all our important projects.

We believe that the creation of a model for business leadership in a sustainable global society is a key opportunity for influencing management education and the way business is conducted.

Success will be measured by products, profile and impact. As we engage in the process, there would be a number of possible interim products: research and discussion papers, published papers, reports from conferences and seminars, curriculum recommendations and changes, and new curricular content and materials for current students and business executives. We would also seek to build profile for these issues with our internal and external marketplaces.

Ultimately, impact is everything. The project's success would not only be determined by the development of a new conceptual model, but also by the use of that model in our curriculum and by current and future business leaders who come into contact with Rotman. Beyond Rotman, we will look for our impact on other schools and business leaders more broadly through the Aspen TIP coalition and by the number of references to our publications and ideas in journals.