What Does The Corporate University of The Future' Look Like?
What Does The Corporate University of The Future' Look Like?
What Does The Corporate University of The Future' Look Like?
Phil Parker, INSEAD Chaired Professor of Management Science, sees things differently. He
envisions a future where digital technology enables B-schools and corporate universities,
working together, to expand their combined reach as never before.
Monetising the corporate university: This concept, which Parker calls “value chain
education”, has emerged at a moment when corporate universities are under increasing
pressure to prove their profitability. The simplest way for CUs to generate revenue is to
open their doors to paying customers beyond company walls. The company’s existing value
chain partners are low-hanging fruit for CUs looking to monetise, but the overall market
potential is much broader. The “multiplier effect” of value chain education becomes even
more powerful, Parker says, when combined with the scalability of online platforms.
Digitisation also solves the problem of affordability.
Corporate universities should step up and develop a point of view to help with ethical, moral
and technical dilemmas that technology brings. New technologies like augmented reality
will aid in performance support-type training.
ING: “Knowledge Café” – an open meeting where the topic is thrown open for debate and
discussion. Some cafés are open to specific groups of managers but others are available to
anyone in the company at any level. When I heard about this, I was frankly rather
impressed. I couldn’t help but think, “This is indeed innovative.” But what hit me most is
that this type of corporate learning sits in such stark contrast to the world of standard
corporate universities.
Corporate universities will likely survive to the extent that they provide the core courses in
management and leadership development, modified to account for the new skills corporate
executives will need in the future—skills like creativity, flexibility, adaptability, and
innovation leadership. But corporate universities will need to begin changing – pushing
learning down into the everyday work world of their people, as ING is doing. The corporate
learning departments of the future must cultivate a “culture of learning” throughout the
organization. The keys to this culture include encouraging reflection, enabling knowledge
sharing, and instituting learning as a continuous process. While there may still be value in
formal classroom learning, more of it will need to happen informally, through initiatives like
webinars, brief workshops, and ING-style Knowledge Cafés. Companies will need to
transform learning from a formal event or activity into something more akin to what is
called collaborative (or social) and emergent learning. These types of initiatives focus on
topics that are highly relevant and in-the-moment for managers and workers, and where
the sharing of ideas and exchange of opinions lead to creativity and innovation.
Learning will also need to reach out to include every level of employee, as everyone in
today’s company must learn how to be an adaptable team player, subject matter expert,
and potential source of innovation. In the future, talent management should partner closely
with corporate learning to ensure that organizations always have the right people ready to
be in the right place at the right time.
How do you deliver the contemporized Crotonville ‘brand’
through the experience?
To remain at the forefront of an increasingly digital future and to scale the ‘Crotonville
effect’ and reach more employees worldwide, GE formalized a digital learning strategy
which, in 2016, evolved into BrilliantYOU™, an online learning experience platform.
BrilliantYOU was created to better scale and enable talent development and to up skill the
GE workforce. Included in the vision of the platform experience was the ability to curate a
variety of learning experiences to meet the needs of different business units and functions
and to address unique learning preferences. BrilliantYOU would need to be a one-stop-shop
for learning, providing employees not only with access to books, videos, and blogs but to
courses and functional academies that could replicate a Crotonville-like classroom
experience.
The GE learning and technology team, known as the BrilliantYOU team, wanted to create a
cost-effective, best-in class learning experience for large, distributed teams while
maintaining the meaningful connections established in a classroom environment. To create
a social, connected, digital classroom, GE sought an online learning delivery platform that
met the following criteria:
Currently, GE offers over 40 online courses on the NovoEd learning platform, including a mix
of GE-created content as well as content from NovoEd partners like UVA’s Darden School of
Business, UC, Berkeley, and Stanford University. Topics range from leadership, storytelling,
and on boarding to finance, supply chain, and engineering.