This paper summarizes the efforts of a business school to better connect with its students in their first year of college. The school learned that by building student connections through a focused first year experience course and developing business school specific linked courses, it was able to have a greater impact on student satisfaction, preference for the school’s curriculum, intentions to return to the school and the university. The school’s strategy introduces a fundamental shift in the typical business school/student relationship by connecting with the student from the moment he or she arrives on campus.

This paper discusses why innovation must be taught in our MBA programs and reviews strategies for implementation of innovation-focused curricula. We examine evidence of the desire from students to learn innovation. We also discuss the need of corporations to hire employees equipped to participate in innovation of products, services, and internal processes, as well as the importance of sustained innovative capability within firms to withstand the explosive growth of the technology pool in countries such as China and India. The paper reviews data that show that innovation is a discipline that can be taught, and reviews the efforts of U.S. business schools in that regard. Four approaches are identified for the implementation of curricula. We argue that the most comprehensive of these is where instructional modules focused respectively on innovation in marketing, technology, organization, and business models are leveraged into undergraduate, MBA, and executive level education.

The hue and cry over questionable business practices revealed by whistle-blowers continues to keep the spotlight on business ethics and the efforts to improve practices used in organizations. As a result, colleges of business are expected to place ever greater emphasis on ethics. One method of increasing ethical awareness is to use corporate whistleblowers to share their personal experiences. Such a whistle-blower served as the high-profile keynote speaker as part of one mid-western university’s annual business symposium. Data collected both before and after the presentation from individuals attending the keynote address found no significant differences in their views of the ethics of a business scenario, indicating that using a high-profile speaker does not have an immediate, significant impact on students’ ethical sensitivity or reasoning. Significant differences were found, however, between those who attended the keynote address and those who did not. Thus, using a high-profile speaker may be a case of "preaching to the choir" by reinforcing, rather than changing, existing ethical attitudes. Nevertheless, reinforcement of positive ethical attitudes may have long-term value.

Online education is no longer new to universities, but as offerings increase and as new students are reached, there are faculty who have yet to face their first online class. Folklore abounds in this arena, and faculty who have not taught online, particularly those with extensive classroom experience, often express deep reluctance to transform their courses to an online modality. In many topics within the business curriculum, the transformation is complicated further by the need to effectively present problem-solving techniques and assess students’ learning of those techniques. In this paper, we present an introductory guide – a battle plan so to speak – to aid business faculty in successfully moving to and surviving in the online teaching environment. We draw our conclusions from experience teaching over 30 sections of online classes, and provide a realistic set of best practices for online instruction in business courses. Not surprisingly, many are based on good business management skills we already teach in the classroom.

The determination of the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium is often difficult for students. Further, the understanding of when a player should mix strategies relative to when more simple choices could be made often confuses students. In this paper, I discuss a classroom game that focuses on mixed strategies. Playing the role of a football coach, students choose either to run or pass (if they are an offensive football coach) or to defend the run or defend the pass (if they are a defensive football coach). The game helps provide students an intuitive understanding of the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, including why and when mixed strategies should be employed.

There are compelling reasons for implementing experiential learning exercises into undergraduate-level Operations Management core courses. For instance, undergraduate students typically lack the practical experience to draw upon to develop deep understanding. Nadkarni (2003) shows that a "hybrid" approach that utilizes a mix of the traditional lecture-discussion method with experiential learning best suits undergraduate students enrolled in introductory management courses. The purpose of this paper is to share how we use a series of experiential exercises we call "Real-Time Cases" (RTCs) to create our own hybrid approach. Improved student performance has been documented since RTC implementation.