30 September 2015
When Dr Liz Grant, Director of Edinburgh’s Global Health Academy, asked me to chair a panel on University-Business-Healthcare Provider collaborations’ in New York last week, I was honoured. The workshop was going to look at how these collaborations can support one of the United Nations’ top three Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 – health and wellbeing.
The last minute request took me by surprise and I have to say I hesitated before saying yes. But I soon found myself navigating the gridlock caused by Pope Francis’ Big Apple visit on my way to a workshop at the Carnegie Corporation’s grand HQ on Maddison Avenue.
During the day spent in discussions with the assembled leaders – from organisations including Pfizer, Partners in Health, Cornell Medical College, the Rockefeller Foundation, United National Development Programme, and Yale Global Health Leadership Institute – I began to reflect on how beneficial this eleventh hour commitment in my diary had been in jolting my thinking.
Firstly, as a valuable change of environment, it threw me together with very different people grappling with slippery challenges that a business school might not normally see as its normal fare.
Second, it underlined for me how great a challenge managing the ‘avalanche of big data’ (as one eloquent participant put it) poses to organisations, particularly those in the global health sector.
And thirdly, because it reminded me that universities have a phenomenal power to convene people from all walks of life to utilise their expertise in creative ways.
At Edinburgh we have world-class talent in the analysis of ‘big data’, but its real value can only be realised when we give students the opportunity to apply the theory to real organisational and societal challenges, to test and develop the skills they need to transform organisations, and their future careers.
While academics at their worst moments often feel their expertise as esoteric, collectively, our power as universities to convene diverse talent and bring it to bear on real problems is immense.
And in doing so we can expose our students to rich ‘in-the-field’ learning contexts that help them develop as the ‘triathletes’ — individuals who are able to work across the boundaries of business, civil society, and government -organisations are now crying out for. Challenges like global inequalities in health and well-being.
Joining us for the workshop, recent Edinburgh MBA graduate Nadia Hajjar shared her experience working as an intern for the Global Health Academy on a Johnson & Johnson sponsored project exploring the business opportunities around the United Nations’ new Strategic Development Goals.
The experience has been so rewarding for both the School and Johnson & Johnson in fact, that next week two more of our MBAs will begin work on a new project in Ghana with the life sciences firm’s Corporate Citizenship Director, Ian Walker.
For me, that’s just the type of contextual challenge you will experience by going beyond the classroom. Because it is only by embedding our students in new contexts that they will really learn. Our challenge going forward is to find ways of expanding such opportunities to even more of our programme participants.
At a personal level, the New York workshop also gave me the chance to do what I think more academics should do – get out more, to listen, absorb, reflect on, and respond to, new contexts as ‘resources’ which almost always affect our thinking in formative ways.
So next time when you get asked to go somewhere new, don't hesitate. Just say ‘yes’. Context really does matter and you never know where it might take you.
Professor Ian Clarke is Dean of University of Edinburgh Business School.