Hult Alumni Magazine | Page 62

ON CAMPUS Developing a future mindset through blended learning Hult’s mission is to fully prepare its students to enter the international business arena. But equipping everyone with the skills needed to succeed is no easy feat when you are working in an environment where change is the only constant. Hult has developed an innovative future mindset course to help students keep up with today’s business world. Teaching the future A city ahead of the times The next decade will see the ascendancy of new exponential technologies that will change global economic realities and ways of daily life. Making sense of the possibilities and experiences that a new world of mobility, Big Data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence will bring requires a future mindset that can understand and act in rapidly shifting digital contexts, organizations, and technologies. ‘City of the Future’ was chosen as the theme through which students developed their future mindsets. They worked in teams to define new digital products, services, and/or experiences that could become a reality in their campus city. They were exposed to the tools, techniques, and tactics that digitally-forward organizations use to build workplace future mindsets. Working in a product management context meant they had to interrogate and develop a profound understanding of their own ideas. The hypothesis they formed then had to be prototyped and robustly validated to comply with prevailing business practices. By the end of the course, students had gained the knowledge and experience needed to learn, succeed, fail, and grow in the future economy. Embracing the future mindset Hult reacted to this new business reality by developing a six-week blended program tailored to the needs of Masters in International Business students. The course’s main objective is to build key competencies in the mindsets and approaches of the new digital economy. Students learn how startups and today’s digitally-forward organizations define new opportunities by designing forward- looking business concepts and understanding how to turn them into learning and growth. They experience the chaos and uncertainty of how a product moves from idea to concept through hypothesis, pivots, and iterations, and gain actionable insights into just how critical the product manager role is within digital organizations that embrace the future mindset. 62