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The GIM and ESADE Business School

Founded in 1958 in Barcelona, ESADE Business School is an independent non-profit university institution with an approach dedicated to personal development and social responsibility. The mission of ESADE Business School is to educate and undertake research in the fields of Management for:

  • The comprehensive training of professionally competent and socially responsible people.
  • Knowledge creation relevant to the improvement of organizations and society.
  • Contribution to the social debate regarding the building of free, prosperous and just societies. 

The GIM was designed in line with ESADE Business School’s vision to inspire and prepare global-minded individuals to become highly-competent and innovative professionals capable of successfully address the social challenge of the future. Its implementation has been a reality as a result of the fruitful collaboration with the partner business schools of NYU Stern (US), SDA Bocconi (Italy) and Sogang University (South Korea). The collaboration process had a gradual implementation starting on the 2012 – 2013 academic year: ESADE Business School implemented the first pilot version of the program with their own students. In the following academic year, 2013 – 2014, the partner Business Schools mentioned before joint for an international edition of the GIM project. In the academic course 2014 – 2015, another international edition was carried out with the same Business Schools partners.

The idea to develop the GIM stemmed from a curriculum innovation experience of the Bachelor of Business Administration at ESADE in the academic year 2010‐2011. In short, this experience consisted of proposing an Integrative Module at the beginning of the second year of the 4‐year Bachelor’s programme, the novelty of which lay in that students were:

  • Asked to solve what was an authentic social, political and economic problem at the time in Spain. More specifically, they were asked to imagine they were consultants who had been asked by a Parliamentary Commission to provide their recommendations as to the implementation of the postponement of the retirement age.
  • Required to go beyond reflection and elaborate a personal and yet conceptually and practically justified position on the matter, by producing a technical report which had to answer some specific questions.
  • Asked to solve the task by using the knowledge and skills acquired in the courses of Economy I and Economy II, Organization I and Sociology I, all of which they had pursued in the first year of their studies.
  • Confronted with the real‐life dimension of the problem when they were asked to gather stakeholders’ views on the matter. In order to do so, they first had to choose the business sector in which they preferred to focus their attention: chemistry sector, secondary education sector, university education sector or mass consumption. Then, as a second step, they were asked to interview a member of the professional group and of the direction of an organization of the corresponding sector in order to obtain their opinion on the adequacy and implications of the measure they had to present a positioning on.
  • Asked students to do all this in teams of 4 or 5 students each, thus providing an interesting opportunity to test their team‐work competence when solving a complex task.

This curriculum innovation, which was made possible thanks to the joined effort of the Bachelor’s Director and the Educational Innovation and Academic Quality team in ESADE, aimed to improve the quality of undergraduate students’ education by:

  • Improving students’ self‐regulation abilities.
  • Confronting students with authentic and relevant problems and asking them to solve them in all their complexity (vs. superficially).
  • Articulating management learning around tasks that approach the challenge of authentic professional activity. 

Also, as a by-product of the educational innovation experience, we aimed at developing participating professors’ teaching competences by increasing their awareness regarding:

  • The characteristics of learning tasks that make the training of competent professionals possible.
  • The way in which students are capable of putting the previously learned competences and knowledge into action.