Source: Forbes
Tata Hall, named in honor of Ratan N. Tata, who served as chairman of one of India's largest business conglomeratres, Tata Group, is a recent example - a glass and brick building that includes residential space and classrooms with panoramic views of the Charles River. It has been joined this summer by the Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center, a gift from the Chao family that acts as a hub for executives, faculty and MBA students.
But the ambitious construction plans don't stop there, and HBS has filed detailed plans with the Boston Redevelopment Authority for two new buildings on its campus in Allston as part of Harvard's Institutional Master Plan from 2013. They include a 1,000-seat auditorium big enough to fit an entire MBA class.
Harvard is not alone in building for the future. Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management has committed $220 million to complete a 410,000 square-foot lakefront education center that they hope will capture the spirit and energy of the school and its approach to community building. The Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina opened its new $100 million wireless building in 2015 featuring a 500-seater lecture hall, innovative systems to measure air quality and energy usage and a state-of-the-art electronic trading room replete with real-time stock ticker and banks of Bloomberg terminals.
Meanwhile in New York, Columbia Business School is eagerly waiting for the keys to a 17-acre site in Harlem known as Manhattanville, with the promise of "building a new home for generations of future leaders." Historic pledges of over $100 million from Henry Kravis '69, cofounder of private equity firm KKR, and Ronald Perelman, a deal-maker that Forbes estimates to have a net worth of $12.3 billion, have combined with pledges made by graduating Columbia students.
Over on the west coast, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley expects to open up the new North Academic Building to students in early 2017. At a cost of $60 million, the new space claims "cutting-edge facilities to accommodate future advancements in management education, where classroom and digital learning will work together to foster community, while offering sweeping views of the Bay Area." In keeping with the school's commitment to the environment, the building incorporates digital displays of real-time energy data.
This is all good business for the architecture firms that are behind each of these projects, whose poetic building descriptions might qualify them for teaching a marketing communications class to MBA students. They might however want to curb their overuse of the words "ground-breaking," "cutting-edge" and "unique."
But beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars devoted to glass and steel, and the panoramic views of rivers, lakes and silicon valleys, what about the classrooms themselves? After all, the greatest challenge facing business schools and their students is digital. So what will the business school classroom of the future look like?
Back in Boston, the answer is not to be found on the HBS campus, but in the facility of public broadcaster WGBH, a ten-minute ride from the school. This is where Harvard has built its classroom of the future, and what it calls HBX Live. Revealed last year, HBX Live captures a global classroom where participants situated all around the world can be seen on a single screen to communicate and interact in a live virtual classroom. Rather than architects, Harvard turned to technology providers such as Cisco, BSS and X20 to provide uninterrupted power supply, and crystal clear video and audio for up to 60 students without delayed response times or glare.
A person looks on at HBX Live, an online classroom that allows real-time interaction between professors and students from around the world, at the WGBH television studios in Boston, Friday, Aug. 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Gretchen Ertl)
The school has not revealed the cost of fitting out the proprietary classroom, but dollar for dollar the impact of the new virtual classroom has the potential to turn business education on its head.
Determined to not be left behind in the digital age, business schools from Europe are also innovating when it comes to the future of learning. IE Business School in Spain launched its WOW (Window on the World) Room in October this year. Located on IE's Madrid campus, the WOW Room is a physical space with 48 screens that comprise a digital tapestry of 45m2 shaped in the form of a "U" and with up to 200 degree vision. The hardware includes two tactile screens and cameras that permit the recording and editing of sessions in real time. In order to coordinate the space, the WOW Room team works with latest generation computers, SyncRTC servers, robots and holographic projectors.
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