Op-Ed by Editor
Business schools have become victims of their own success. Across Europe in particular, the market is saturated and increasingly devoid of future promise. Institutions may differ in logos and branding, but when it comes to pedagogy, logic, and practice, the mimicry is striking. Nearly every school repeats the same narratives and clichés, and students are expected to engage with the same concepts, “responsible leadership,” “innovation,” “impact,” delivered through largely identical methodologies and epistemologies. Everyone claims to integrate corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and ethics. Yet beneath these expansive concepts, managerial pedagogy has barely changed since the 1980s.
PowerPoint slides, case studies, standardized assessments, and promises of excellence dominate the classroom. Even schools that present themselves as pedagogically innovative tend to react only after technologies become buzzwords. Inevitably, the system reproduces itself under the illusion of progress.
The deeper problem is that business schools are becoming increasingly irrelevant, while remaining deeply relevant to the very system they claim to critique. They feed managerial capitalism by producing compliant professionals who learn to optimize within existing structures but rarely to imagine beyond them. In this sense, business schools have become training grounds for functional adaptation rather than intellectual transformation. Their research follows a similar logic, formatted for closed academic markets and rewarded through citation counts and journal rankings rather than societal imagination.
If there is a future for education, it might not come from business schools at all. It might come from art and design schools.
Art and design education operates through a fundamentally different epistemology. Students are not rewarded for reproducing models or citing the right sources, but for developing a voice, a perspective, and a process. They learn by doing, iterating, reflecting, and presenting work for critique. Learning is dialogical, experiential, and often embodied. Failure is not framed as resilience theatre but accepted as an integral part of creation. Students are encouraged to interpret context, culture, and aesthetics, not merely to satisfy market demands, but to question what “need” means in the first place.
These are precisely the qualities business education has lost. When business schools speak of “innovation,” they often mean commercialization. When they speak of “creativity,” they usually mean structured brainstorming for efficiency. Imagination has been reduced to a managerial competence, stripped of its moral, aesthetic, and human dimensions.
Design education, by contrast, is grounded in the recognition that form and meaning are inseparable. The studio is a social space where critique coexists with collaboration, where iteration and failure are part of collective learning. Art does not seek efficiency. Design does not exist solely to be profitable. The process is public and uncomfortable, yet deeply relational. It cultivates thinkers who tolerate ambiguity, perceive patterns, and connect emotion with systems.
These are precisely the capacities required in an era marked by ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and digital automation.
In the end, the question is when art and design schools will replace business schools. Also if /whether business schools can still learn to think like artists. If they cannot, the next generation of transformative leaders may no longer pass through the polished glass doors of management campuses, but through cluttered studios where imagination still survives.