Imagine giving an MBA student a case study about a company losing customers. They analyse the problem, examine the numbers, recommend a strategy and present their findings. The faculty evaluates their response, and the student moves on to the next assignment.
Now imagine asking the same student to find five paying customers for a business idea of their own.
Suddenly, the questions change. Who should I approach? Why would someone trust me? What if nobody wants the product? What happens when the first strategy fails?
The second exercise may look less academically sophisticated, but it can reveal something the first cannot: whether a student knows what to do when there is no case study telling them where to begin.
This is the shift I believe management education needs to take seriously. The Problem Isn’t the Case Study. It’s Where Learning Ends.
Having spent over 15 years working in management education, from Educesta to building EIMR Business School, I have seen the value of a strong academic foundation. Finance, marketing, operations and strategy remain essential. Case studies are equally valuable because they expose students to decisions made by businesses they may otherwise never encounter.
But a case study comes with an advantage that actual business rarely offers: someone has already identified the problem, organised the information and decided which facts are relevant.
In the real world, identifying the problem is often half the struggle.
A founder may believe poor sales are a marketing issue when the actual problem is pricing. A family business successor may want to introduce technology when the deeper issue is unclear accountability. A manager may have plenty of data but little understanding of what customers actually want.
The challenge for business schools is to teach students not only how to analyse the information in front of them, but also how to determine what information is missing.
From Studying Decisions to Making Them
Consider a student developing a direct-to-consumer product. The classroom can explain customer acquisition costs, pricing strategies and contribution margins.
But ask that student to sell 50 units, and those concepts begin to mean something different.
They discover that people who appreciate a product may not buy it. A lower price might increase orders without improving profitability. Customers may raise objections that were never considered during product development.
These are not distractions from management education. They are opportunities to apply it.
I believe MBA programmes should create more situations in which students must test an assumption, make a decision, observe the outcome and explain what they would change.
This could happen through live consulting assignments, business simulations, market experiments, internships or actual entrepreneurial ventures.
The objective is not to turn every MBA student into a startup founder. It is to ensure that students develop the judgment to take responsibility for business decisions, whichever career they pursue.
AI Makes This Shift More Urgent
Artificial intelligence has added another dimension to the conversation.
Today, students can use AI tools to summarise reports, analyse datasets, develop marketing plans and prepare presentations in a fraction of the time these activities previously required.
This is useful, but it also raises an uncomfortable question for educators: if a student can generate a convincing business recommendation in minutes, how do we establish whether they actually understand it?
The answer cannot simply be to prohibit technology.
Instead, assessments must evolve. Students should be expected to explain their assumptions, verify information, defend their recommendations and demonstrate how their decisions perform under changing conditions.
An AI tool might suggest a market-entry strategy. But can the student recognise when its assumptions are unrealistic? Can they explain the financial risk? Can they adapt when a customer or competitor behaves unexpectedly?
Technology can improve the speed of analysis. It does not remove the responsibility of making a sound decision.
Different Business Ambitions Require Different Learning Experiences
Another limitation of conventional management education is the assumption that every student is preparing for a similar professional journey.
Consider two MBA students. One wants to build a business from scratch. The other is preparing to take over a family enterprise established by their parents.
The first may need to learn how to validate demand, acquire initial customers and develop a viable business model.
The second may face entirely different decisions: introducing professional management, resolving succession challenges, modernising operations or expanding without damaging longstanding customer relationships.
Both require management fundamentals. But preparing them for their responsibilities should involve different kinds of practical exposure.
This thinking informs our approach at EIMR, where we are developing distinct learning journeys for future founders and family business successors, with business challenges, entrepreneurial mentorship and practical execution forming part of the learning experience.
The larger point, however, applies to every business school: practical learning must reflect the responsibilities students are preparing to undertake.
Business Schools Must Rethink What They Assess
For decades, management education has relied heavily on examinations, presentations, assignments and final placement outcomes to demonstrate student progress.
These measures have their place. But they cannot tell us everything.
Can a student identify a commercially viable opportunity? Can they negotiate with an unfamiliar customer? Can they evaluate the consequences of a poor decision? Can they work through uncertainty without waiting for instructions?
These capabilities require more than a written examination.
Business schools need assessment systems that recognise the quality of students’ decisions, their ability to learn from unsuccessful experiments and the improvements they make through repeated application.
A failed business experiment, supported by rigorous analysis and reflection, may sometimes demonstrate more learning than a perfectly presented business plan that has never been tested.
The MBA classroom is not moving beyond textbooks because theory has become irrelevant. It is moving beyond them because knowing the theory is no longer sufficient evidence of capability.
If management education is meant to prepare people to lead businesses, its classrooms must give students meaningful opportunities to experience the responsibility that leadership demands.
By Mr. Deepakk Kummar, Founder, EIMR Business School