Why build a campus in a digital age?

If you follow news from IESE, you’ll have seen that this fall we are inaugurating our new Madrid campus, tripling the size of our facilities in the Spanish capital, increasing our activities there by 50% and renewing our focus on entrepreneurship.

Why is IESE opening a new campus? It’s a question I have been asked a few times over the last several months. Beneath this question is the assumption that in a world that is moving online, physical spaces matter less to us than virtual ones, and that a global school like IESE should place its bets entirely on remote learning.

In a previous article I discussed how, over the last 18 months, we have learned as an institution both the potential and the limits of online learning for executives. ?

So why a new campus?

The idea of the university campus began in Europe with the founding of the University of Bologna and the University of Oxford in the late 11th century, with the goal of “cloistering” students and teachers together.

Anyone who has visited the campus of a leading university has experienced the special kind of energy you find there. Bright people come together, disconnect from other things and focus on studying and working together. Some of the world’s most innovative businesses recognize the value of this as well: companies such as Apple and Microsoft have built their own campuses – clusters of buildings surrounded by green space, living factories of ideas.

For IESE, the main reason to build a new campus is to achieve the thought-provoking interactions and the intense learning you get when you gather smart people in a place that invites collaboration and cooperative work. Our Madrid campus will be a place for creating bonds – between IESE professors and students, between the executives who study there, between alumni, between their companies and all the people who participate in the learning process. For me, building and maintaining those bonds is at the heart of what we believe education can do.

Our new campus will also be a place of profound thought on the role of business in our world. We find that when you are in a classroom setting, removed from the obligations of home and work, it allows for the sort of deeper thinking not only about how to run a business well – which is vitally important – but also how to make sure that the work you do benefits all stakeholders. Beyond shareholders, that means improving the lives of employees, customers, suppliers and the community: being, in essence, a force for good in society. And all this, with a clear focus on sustainability. That of course includes being environmentally friendly, but it also means understanding and teaching sustainability along the lines of the UN’s definition of sustainable development: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

The initial idea behind university campuses centuries ago was to bring students and teachers together, away from the outside world. That still rings true, but the possibilities of doing the reverse have changed. Thanks in part to technology, we can bring the world to our campuses, so that global business can be analyzed and understood with the perspective you get from taking a few steps back. We hope that, among other things, our new Madrid campus will be a place to form deep links and to reimagine business as a powerful force for generating sustainable, positive impact in society.?