Can we fix it? Views from the EFMD annual conference 2025

17 June 2025

Ian Hawkings takes the temperature of business school Deans from around the world, the challenges they face and some of the solutions.

The EFMD annual conference is always a good bell-weather for the business education sector. And as leaders from the world’s top management schools convened in Munich this year, the big talking point was the recent actions taken against HE in the US - namely the blocking of Harvard’s rights to house foreign students and faculty.  

The conference theme was ‘navigating uncertainty: business schools and the ecosystems of innovation’ - but I doubt the organisers had any idea just how uncertain things would seem, nor how unsteady the world’s preeminent international education ecosystem would look come the start of the event. Nevertheless, if there’s one thing you can guarantee from a room full of business school academics, it’s that they will tell us how to fix whatever it is that’s broken.  

One of the sessions that stood out saw Google’s resident AI educator explaining some of the practical things business schools could do to scale their AI efforts – it does feel as though we are now post ‘wow look at this shiny new toy’ phase of AI integration and moving into the ‘genuine value extraction’ era. This is a good thing. 

Another session focussed on reimagining internationalisation, which was about as ‘on the nose’ as it was possible to be in the current circumstances, and the conference wrapped up with a keynote from Harvard Business School academic, Rebecca Henderson, who delivered a powerful (albeit slightly depressing in some places) clarion call to shake up the very system that business schools were built to develop – Western capitalism. 

As ever, these messages were delivered, and debated, in the kind of ‘can do’ spirit that makes you think the world might be in a better place if those in charge of our business schools and universities were given a rather wider remit in society.  

The old ivory towers adage seems further away than ever...