The Hopkins Carey Business School and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) are launching a new joint Masters of Design and Masters of Business Administration degree program in Design and Leadership.
The program, expected to launch in 2012, is the only program in the country which will provide students the opportunity to earn a dual-degree from a major research university and a prominent college of art and design.
The new program is designed to teach the skills needed for competent business leadership while providing a cohesive, cooperative environment to foster team work shills and create innovative business solutions.
The combined Masters of Design and Masters of Business Administration program will be structured to allow students to take both traditional MBA programs while attending a program with Design students. The class of MBA and Design students will allow students with different academic backgrounds — such as architecture, business, and engineering — to work together to solve problems with a wealth of knowledge. With this combination of students, participants in the program can combine their past experiences to come up with solutions that are not necessarily limited by strictly "business" classes. A few sample classes are Creativity and Innovation, Cultural Awareness, and Social Responsibility.
This dual-degree program is not an entirely new concept for Hopkins. While there has not been a whole joint degree between MICA and the Carey Business School before, there has been a cooperative element between the two institutions in the past.
"The program grew out of a relationship we had with the Carey Business School in the past," David Gracyalny, the dean of the School for Professional and Continuing Studies at MICA, said. "We built a class of both business and design students, and they worked to find innovative solutions to real-world problems. This was really the catalyst for the new program."
Gracyalny also commented that this class, called Competitive Advantage, was geared towards finding environmentally-friendly solutions to problems in the real world.
The proposal for the MA/MBA program points out a need for transformable leaders in the business world.
"Rather than students seeing themselves as just going out and doing traditional work in the business world, we hope these students will be developing a whole set of knowledge based on their areas of expertise to transform businesses. We want them to ask, ‘What value does a product have on community and sustainability?' It's about applying the logic of the design process to the way we think about manufacturing things," Gravyalny said.
Interestingly, the program is focused on creating flexible, open-minded, logical leaders than it is with strictly giving students a business background. Gracyalny hopes that participants in the program will learn to think "like Steve Jobs" when tackling problems and creating solutions.
The MA/MBA program will be a 18 to 20 month, 66-credit program that requires students to develop and enhance their in-depth knowledge in diverse areas such as finance, law, marketing, and management. The program also heavily focuses on collaboration.
"Two brains are better than one, and three brains are better than two," Gracyalny said."This is a revolutionary program…most programs focus on the management, not how you transform the idea of design. It's unique in that it's focused on attracting all of these types of students to work together, and it is unique because there are two distinct institutions working together who bring substantial gravitas to the subject."
While there are similar programs at other institutions, such programs do not have the advantage of attracting a diverse body of undergraduates and of combining two large graduate institutions.
"I want to see if people have become leaders while working on group projects," Gracyalny said. "We're looking for people with backgrounds in engineering, design, arts, marketing, so there can be a diverse group of people bringing in their knowledge to this combined program."
Prospective applicants to the program can come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but, no matter what they have studied in their undergraduate work, they should be skilled leaders.
"We don't necessarily want to make business people into artists, or artists into businessmen. Rather, we want to merge business and artistic skills together so that those two can come together," Patrick Ercolano, a media representative of the Communications Office of the Carey Business School, said.
The MA/MBA program is not just preparing students to enter the workforce, but to get creative with their career paths.
"We're kind of in an interesting place with our economy," Gracyalny said. "People are going to need more interesting pathways. Many people are going to graduate from this program and think of new ideas for transforming business."
