1. How are business schools responding to the rising demand for courses in social entrepreneurship, sustainability, ethics, and impact investing?

The response is mixed, and honestly, the demand itself is complicated.

There's genuine interest from students who want to build businesses that create impact alongside profit. But there's also virtue signalling: students who want "sustainability" on their resume without changing how they actually think about business.

Here's what nobody wants to say: most social enterprises fail. Not because their hearts weren't in the right place, but because good intentions don't pay salaries. The graduates who succeed are the ones who can read a balance sheet, understand unit economics, and make hard trade-offs between impact and viability.

What's shifting is how the best programs are teaching this. Not as morality, but as strategy. Climate risk isn't an ethics question. It's a $23 trillion repricing of global assets. Labour practices aren't about being nice; they're about supply chain resilience. ESG isn't compliance; it's where capital is flowing. These aren't separate topics for do-gooders. They're core business literacy for a market where every CEO gets grilled on sustainability in quarterly earnings calls.

2. Are B-schools effectively updating their curricula to reflect the needs of a rapidly evolving business landscape, including emerging focus areas such as AI, digital strategy, ESG, behavioural science, and design thinking?

Yes, but not fast enough. And the reason isn't incompetence. It's structural.

ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months. Most curriculum revision cycles take 3-5 years. That structural gap is the real problem.

What I'm seeing is schools adding courses with the right labels: "AI Strategy," "Design Thinking", but that's not the same as transformation. The question isn't whether students take a course on AI. It's whether they're using AI in every course, the way professionals do.

The shift that's happening (albeit slowly) is from "what courses should we add?" to "how do we completely rethink how we teach?" Integration rather than addition. But it's hard, and most institutions are still debating while the market moves.

3. What role do study abroad programs, international internships, and globally diverse faculty play in shaping globally minded and culturally agile business leaders?

They're critical, but the format matters more than the fact of it.

A semester abroad while living with other international students doesn't fundamentally change how you think. It's exposure, not transformation. Real cultural agility comes from discomfort. Working where you don't speak the language, pitching to clients with completely different decision-making processes, failing because you misread cultural cues.

We've built SP Jain Global around multi-city immersion. Students relocate between Sydney, Dubai, Singapore, and our sister school in London as part of their core program. What we've learned is that this forces a different kind of learning. When you're navigating Middle Eastern business protocols in Dubai, then adapting to Singapore's corporate hierarchies, and then working in Australia's collaborative culture, you develop pattern recognition that no case study can teach.

It's expensive and operationally complex, which is why most schools default to partnerships and exchange programs.

4. How are schools embracing global case studies, international market simulations, and forming strategic partnerships with foreign universities to add a cross-cultural dimension to learning?

These are now standard in most programs, and that's good. Global case studies expose students to different markets and business models. Simulations let them test strategies in unfamiliar contexts. Partnerships create exchange opportunities.

But there's a difference between reading about a market and working in it. Between simulating cultural complexity and navigating it. The question is how deep the immersion goes.

We've taken the approach of building campuses in key markets rather than partnering with universities in those markets. Students work on actual company projects and internships in Dubai, Singapore, and Sydney. Not simulations of those markets. That's our model, and it works for us, but it's not the only way.

What matters is that students graduate with genuine cross-cultural fluency, not just awareness. They need to have worked across cultures enough times that they've developed both the knowledge and the instincts.

The industry is moving in the right direction. The question is pace and depth.

5. How are business schools incorporating new pillars of management education, such as tech fluency, ethical decision-making, sustainability, and adaptive thinking into their programs?

The recognition that these matters are universal now. The implementation varies wildly.

Tech fluency is the most urgent. We're integrating AI tools across pretty much every course at SP Jain Global. Not just teaching about AI, but teaching with it. Students use AI for pre-learning, revision, and get feedback from AI tutors, learn to work alongside these tools the way they will in their careers. A student recently used our AI tutor to practice interviews 60 times before landing a role in the Middle East. That kind of repetition is impossible with human faculty alone.

Ethical decision-making and sustainability are harder to integrate because they're not skills; they're frameworks for thinking. The programs getting this right are embedding these questions into every case discussion, every strategy analysis, every financial model. Not as separate courses, but as lenses through which you evaluate everything.

Adaptive thinking comes from dealing with ambiguity and incomplete information repeatedly. That requires a different pedagogy: fewer lectures, more problem-solving under uncertainty.

One thing that’s becoming clear is that these aren't "new pillars" you add to traditional management education. They're forcing us to rethink what management education is. And that transformation is still very early.