2021 Innovator Award Announcement

MBA Roundtable Announces its 2021 Innovator Award Winners

The MBA Roundtable is pleased to announce the winners for the 2021 Innovator Award.  Sponsored by BusinessCAS, the 2021 Innovator Award was highly competitive this year and the judges have chosen two winners which were announced at the MBA Roundtable’s 2021 Curricular Innovation Symposium on Thursday, October 28, 2021.  The winners and finalists were as follows:

2021 MBA Roundtable Innovator Award Winners:


Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware
Motivational Tiered Assessment:
Rethinking How We Assess Our GME Students



Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Fully Integrated FT MBA Innovative Experiential Learning Curriculum

The MBA Roundtable Innovator Award was created in 2011 to promote educational initiatives that advance innovation in graduate management education and acknowledge the institutions that drive change in the field.  The Innovator Award raises awareness of ongoing continuous curricular and co-curricular improvements and educates employers, business school leaders, and faculty about innovative practices of best-in-class MBA and Specialized Masters programs.  In 2019, the Innovator Award was split into two categories, allowing the MBA Roundtable to honor established innovations as well as new, early stage innovations.  Last year, the MBA Roundtable introduced the Fast Track Curriculum Innovation Award which was created in response to the recent pandemic, where many MBA programs have put together creative solutions to delivering their programs and curriculum. 

The 2021 Innovator Award Winners were evaluated on the following criteria: Concept/Initiative, Execution, Outcomes and Presentation.  First round judges put forth six finalists for the final round of judging and interviews.  The 2021 Innovator Award Finalists were as follows:
 
 
2021 Innovator Award Finalists:

TBS Education
Teaching through comedy: Injecting humor into educational videos


University of Iowa
Innovating the Triple Threat MBA: Flexibility, Quality and Scalability


PSG Institute of Management
Transformative Matrix Pedagogy for Teaching Organizational Behavior


University of Wisconsin-Madison
Professional MBA: Innovative "Badge" Curriculum

2021 Finalist Judges:

Nima Farshchi
Director, Center for Social Value Creation
Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland

Grace McCarthy
Dean of Business
UOW School of Business | Faculty of Business and Law
University of Wollongong

Loredana Padurean
Senior Associate Dean
Asia School of Business

Lucy Swedberg
Executive Editor/Sr. Editorial Director
Harvard Business Publishing

Stephen Taylor
Director of Research
BusinessCAS

 
 
About the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware - Motivational Tiered Assessment: Rethinking How We Assess Our GME Students
University of Delaware Professors Mark Serva, Amanda Convery and Amanda Bullough at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics redesigned how Lerner College assesses graduate management students (GME) by creating an innovative motivational tiered assessment (MTA). MTA is changing assumptions about grading in the Lerner MBA program, MTA's relative advantages, data that support these advantages, and how MTA will be integrated into Lerner GME programs in the future. Under MTA, students can achieve higher grades only when they exhibit higher levels of intrinsic motivation, because students choose the amount (and difficulty) of work they complete.

"The challenge that we address is improving the meaning of graduate management education (GME) grades, and—by extension—differentiating different levels of GME student performance," said Mark Serva, associate professor of MIS at the University of Delaware's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics. "My colleagues and I started by questioning the assumptions surrounding grading. After some background research and significant development work and refinement, the result was motivational tiered assessment (MTA), an approach that changes not only how we grade, but also tightly ties grades to the student's level of intrinsic motivation to learn."

For more than 100 years, the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics has invested in its students and communities, giving back philanthropically and with its valuable skills. A top-ranked business school, the Lerner College creates impactful initiatives that advocate for diversity and inclusion across industries. Its 150+ faculty conduct research on meaningful topics like third world economic development, cybersecurity, women’s leadership, corporate social responsibility and more. Through collaborations with students and alumni, the Lerner College creates businesses that work to solve society’s greatest problems.

About the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School - Fully Integrated FT MBA Innovative Experiential Learning Curriculum:
Johns Hopkins Carey Business School’s emphasis on experiential learning provides MBA students with many opportunities to put leadership and analytical skills to work in addressing real-world business challenges. Through a sequential and carefully designed portfolio of experiential courses and electives, students learn to collaborate with corporate teams to address current business opportunities, and practice creative problem solving through design thinking and quantitative analysis, ultimately culminating in evidenced-based recommendations. A key component in the sequence of experiential learning courses is the Innovation Field Project, in which student teams work directly with corporate partners to analyze critical business opportunities and challenges, provide consultation, and identify new business possibilities for their sponsors. Other courses in the curriculum sequence include the Big Data Consulting Project, and the two-part Design Lab and Commercializing Discovery courses.

Grounded in the Johns Hopkins’ legacy of excellence and research, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School shapes business leaders who seize opportunity, inspire change, and create lasting value. Carey brings a modern business perspective to Johns Hopkins by shaping leaders who build for what’s next in the global marketplace through innovative, data-driven MBA and MS degree programs, and non-degree executive education.

“Experiential learning is one of the foundations of our MBA program, as it trains our students to make a real impact before they even re-enter the ‘real world’. We are extremely honored to be recognized by the MBA Roundtable,” said Brian Gunia, Associate Dean for Academic Programs at Carey Business School.

The MBA Roundtable and BusinessCAS congratulate all the winners and finalists and look forward to hosting webinars in early 2022 featuring their curricular innovations. 
 
2021 Innovator Award Sponsor: