Business Education and the Fourth Industrial Revolution -

Business Education and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Jobs of Tomorrow by Paresh Soni Associate Director: MANCOSA Graduate School of Business

The world is currently in the midst of an industrial revolution with an exponential pace of change and it is disrupting every industry in every country. This revolution is different from the past three in terms of velocity, scope and impact. It is a digital revolution, characterized by a fusion of technology that is impacting every aspect of how we work and how we live, creating threats and opportunities.

In terms of scale, scope, and complexity, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR, Industry 4.0 or 4IR or Smart Industry) will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. The response to it must involve all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society.

Automation, digital platforms, and other innovations are changing the fundamental nature of work and the disruptive changes that emanate from the FIR will have a profound impact on the employment landscape, business models and perhaps more importantly on business education.

The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. Compared with previous industrial revolutions, the FIR is evolving at an exponential pace. It is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes transform entire systems of production, management and governance.

We cannot foresee today which scenario is likely to emerge, however, in the future, talent, more than capital, will be the critical factor of production.

Skills that we learned in formal education are now becoming irrelevant. With technology evolving so quickly, corporate education and training programmes are lagging behind and are in desperate need for transformation. In addition to the traditional core curriculum of business pedagogy, business schools should begin to focus on education in areas like computers, big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and designed thinking to enable consistent training for all areas of business, especially in management and leadership.
According to the World Economic Forum, the FIR will have four major impacts on business, particularly in terms of customer expectation, product enhancement, collaborative innovation and organisational forms.

Given that customers are increasingly at the centre of the economy, it will be critical for benchmarking customer service. A world of customer experiences, data-based services, and asset performance through analytics require new forms of collaboration, particularly given the speed at which innovation and disruption are taking place. The emergence of global platforms and other new business models mean that talent, culture, and organizational forms need to be rethought and forces companies to re-examine the way they do business.

Thus, within the context of the FIR the emergent business education has to aim at developing a student’s intellectual ability, executive personality and entrepreneurial and managerial skills through an appropriate blend of business and multidisciplinary education. In addition, it needs to provide students with business education of globally recognised best practices with flexibility of their adaptation to indigenous entrepreneurial and societal context.

World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab states that across all industries, there is clear evidence that the technologies that underpin the FIR are having a major impact on businesses. Major shifts on the demand side are also occurring, as growing transparency, consumer engagement and new patterns of consumer behaviour force companies to adapt the way they design, market and deliver products and services.

A key trend is the development of technology-enabled platforms that combine both demand and supply to disrupt existing industry structures, such as those we see within the sharing or on demand economy. These technology platforms, rendered easy to use by the Smartphone, convene people, assets and data—thus, creating entirely new ways of consuming goods and services in the process.

A good example of the above is the ride-sharing services, such as Uber which is essentially a company without its own fleet of cars but eventually became a major player in the transportation industry, so much so that it competed and disrupted the current existing network of taxi franchises and operations worldwide.

We should be reminded that the world is in a state of flux and is causing considerable anxiety. Moreover, neither technology nor the disruption that comes with it is an exogenous force over which humans have no control. All of us are responsible for guiding its evolution, in the decisions we make on a daily basis as ordinary citizens, consumers, and investors. We should thus grasp the opportunity and power we have to shape the FIR and direct it toward a future that reflects our common objectives and values.
To do this, as business educators we must develop a comprehensive and globally shared view of how technology is affecting our lives and reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments. There has never been a time of greater promise, or one of greater potential peril. Today’s decision-makers, however, are too often trapped in traditional, linear thinking, or too absorbed by the multiple crises demanding their attention, to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation shaping the future of global business.

The task of embracing the FIR and ensuring that business leaders and professionals have the skills they need to take their companies forward into a sustainable economy is potentially the most pressing challenge that business education is likely to face over the next few years. Consequently, business education will have to be geared towards educating students about the need to adapt in the current marketplace in order to stay relevant and not rely on old silo-based knowledge structures, especially when everything about business is changing.

It is imperative that business educators challenge their own orthodoxy. Business as usual is no longer an option.

The new knowledge environment spawned by the FIR requires team effort, across the current narrow silo-based knowledge production. It will require specialist from across cognate fields of knowledge to work together as teams or networks to understand the complexities of life.

In a similar fashion, business education needs to transform itself. In essence we need a paradigm shift in business education.

We need a new mindset that is flexible and responsive so that they can deal with complexity, uncertainty and inequality inherent in the world today. Ultimately, the responsibility lies with business education to give graduates the insights and capabilities to build better organisations.