MBA studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences
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July - September 1996
MBA studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences -
experiences and perspectives of a new venture
Susan Powell, Jakob Krarup and Stanislaw Walukiewicz This article describes the experiences of a team of O pera-
tional Research scientists in devising and setting up a two year executive MBA programme at the Warsaw Business School, Centre for Industrial Management at
early September these three and Susan Powell (of the London School of Economics) met in Copenhagen to convert Walukiewicz's ideas and aspirations into a concrete plan with objectives, targets, times-
the Polish Academy of Sciences.
cales and actions.
The work was funded, in cash terms, by the TEMPUS progra,nme of the Europea;, Coin mission, and in time
The principal aim was to launch an MBA pro-
terms, by the individuals and their respective institutions.
The authors describe the history of the project and
comment upu,; its success and the difficulties encountered. The fluai section comments upon the venture fruin an OR viewpoint, since it is um;iusual for Operational Research scientists to have the luxury of designing an MBA course from scratch.
-o0000-
Conception in the spring of 1990 the European Commission
announced the TEMPUS programme. Its aim was to
develop higher education in Eastern Europe. The intention was to make resources available for curriculum development, the provision of teaching materials, training and retraining of indigenous
gramme, of an international standard, in October
1992. The programme would last a year and a
student would take every course. The programme was intended for graduates, preferably those who had a few years work experience. The Polish higher education system produces well-qualified masters level engineers in large numbers, but few, if any, business graduates. It was therefore logical to re-
train the former with the expectation that they would become tomorrow's managers in Polish state owned and private firms, in the representatives of foreign firms in Poland, and in Polish administra-
tion. Given this education background of most prospective students, it was also possible to construct an MBA programme on a stronger base than usual of Quantitative Methods (QM).
It was proposed that QM would be about a quarter of the MBA programme. The term QM was used as we were concerned that the specialist term Opera-
trainers. The TEMPUS programme invited consortia of at least two Western European institutions, one of
tional Research would not be understood by
European organisation to submit proposals and
some might consider not to be OR. We decided to
which had to be a university, and at least one East
plans for up to three years to fulfil these objectives.
The Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), in the new political and economic climate, was faced with the problem of finding commercially viable activities with which to employ the skills of its OR scientists, economists and social scientists. Professor Stanislaw
TEMPUS managers and it also permitted us to include computing and elemen
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