Kellogg Adds 11 New Courses
Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has introduced eleven new courses, including several that have come out of the school’s efforts to promote cross-disciplinary learning.
Announcing the changes, Kellogg emphasized the importance of broad and modern coursework in preparing students for their roles as leaders.
As Therese McGuire, Senior Associate Dean of Curriculum and Teaching, put it:
With increasingly complex problems facing our rapidly changing business environment, curriculum innovation in the MBA program is key…..It’s critical to create new courses that foster innovation and take our students to the forefront of knowledge in their respective areas.
One such future-leaning course, Human and Machine Intelligence, explores recent research in artificial intelligence and possible implications for business leaders, looking at advanced AI like IBM’s chess-playing Deep Blue supercomputer.
Human and Machine Intelligence is a product of Kellogg’s Architectures of Collaboration, a cross-disciplinary initiative looking at the interaction between machine intelligence, big data and human behavior.
Another interdisciplinary course new in 2017 is Business of Social Change, created by Kellogg’s Public-Private Interface, which focuses on “the intersection of business and policy.”
The course will explore how business can affect social change. In addressing this question, coursework will concentrate on a specific social problem: youth unemployment in the United States.
Guest speakers in the course will include employers with many youth employees and policy experts. Meghan Kashner, who will teach the course, said that “Students will complete this course with the skills to determine the roots of a problem and the paths to large-scale and market-driven change.”
A third curriculum offering comes from Kellogg’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative. This new course, Launching and Leading Startups, covers exactly what the name suggests.
Launching and Leading Startups will be taught by Brad Morehead in Winter 2017 and Carter Cast in Spring 2017. Cast described the ideal student for the course:
This will be a good class for students who are curious about entrepreneurship and who think they may pursue an entrepreneurial endeavor in the near future, whether through starting their own business, acquiring a business or joining an early-stage startup.
Other courses introduced this year include Sustainability Across the Enterprise (another offering from the Kellogg Public-Private Interface), Digital Marketing Strategy and Thought Leadership Seminar: Issues in Developing Countries.
Taken together, the new courses show Kellogg’ commitment interdisciplinary learning. Kellogg emphasizes thinking across disciplines as part of their curriculum and has four strategic initiatives designed to foster cross-disciplinary work. For more information, see their website.