The following are remarks from Susan Fournier, Allen Questrom professor and dean of Boston University Questrom School of Business. They have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
We focused on the idea that yesterday’s view of business education is very disciplinary, very siloed and very focused on a given value-creating function like marketing, or finance, or supply chain or operations. We stepped back and thought about the broader capabilities leaders need to build, and designed the program with an interdisciplinary mindset—cutting across all those silos.
With a passion for marketing and branding I see my job as building the reputation and brand of the Boston University Questrom School of Business, as embodied in the stakeholder behaviors, quality of students, faculty and research. The Questrom School of Business also aims to be distinctive in digital business while interfacing with the parallel world at the university level. Our scholarly and academic focus on digital business plays out in digital health, Fintech, in the economics of platform markets, digital marketing and addressability.
That made me question what it means to go to work today, how to think about a distributed workforce, how to maximize partially remote teams—especially as a historically residential campus. How do we redefine the residential academic research university, now that the genie is out of the bottle, the world has changed and it’s not likely we’ll go back?
We need to continuously source new funds and new programs, and we are judicious in this activity. We have a business analytics masters degree, a very powerfully differentiated math finance degree, a social impact MBA and a health sector MBA. Fundraising behind ideas that can have traction among stakeholders is key.As an academic research institution, BU Questrom is all about the students, and so pursues a students-first approach to education.
We have 160 full-time faculty members and we’re all about teaming. For better or for worse, you learn how to work on those teams. It’s amazing to operate as collaborative spirits, and that culture bleeds into the students.