For more than 25 years, I’ve been approached by business school deans seeking advice on international accreditations, rightfully viewed as powerful indicators of quality in a global environment. My work has changed over time, as has my understanding of business education. But there is one thing I’ll never stop saying: “Whatever you do, stay focused on the school’s vision. Accreditation should help you achieve it, not take you away from it.”
What have I been worried about? The tension between achieving global quality and recognition and maintaining local relevance and impact.
The story often begins the same way. A new business school is launched in a fast-growing frontier economy, a post-conflict setting, a country undergoing industrial transformation, or a community seeking to expand its entrepreneurial ecosystem. Its founders are focused on challenges such as digital leapfrogging, public-private collaboration, supporting micro-enterprises, and rebuilding institutional capacity.
There may be room for an MBA program. But more often, these schools are preparing young people to fill urgent talent gaps or helping experienced workers adapt to a changing economy. Faculty may come from diverse backgrounds, including local professionals, retrained academics, or global experts joining remotely. Funding models can vary widely, as can governance frameworks. The main point is that the context largely shapes the vision, mission, and operating model from the start.
From there, the school looks outward. It is eager to learn and understands that building a high-quality institution requires drawing on global experience and knowledge about program offerings, curriculum design, pedagogy, governance, faculty development, technology strategy, student experience, and more. Already the school must be careful, since practices that work in one context don’t always work in another without some adaptation.
Ambition pulls the school further into the global system. Rankings, accreditation frameworks, benchmarking systems, and widely accepted definitions of what constitutes a “top” business school exert a powerful gravitational force. Resource allocations begin to shift as incentives change. Meeting global quality standards begins to feel like an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Over time, these pressures can pull even the most contextually grounded institutions toward models that are less aligned with the needs they were created to serve.
The tension is especially noticeable in research. Dominant models built in North America and Europe emphasize publication in a narrow set of peer-reviewed journals and are often disconnected from local challenges. As these expectations spread globally, schools face pressure to adopt research agendas that enhance the school’s reputation but may not contribute directly to their communities. The result can be a growing gap between what is rewarded and what is relevant.
These tensions create a host of important questions. How do schools learn from global best practices without defaulting to imitation? How do they build legitimacy without sacrificing distinctiveness? How do they become the best school for their context and still be recognized among the best in the world?
Global Business School Network (GBSN) is well positioned to assist schools to navigate these questions, given its mission to “empower business schools worldwide to work together to strengthen the contributions of management education to the development needs of society.”
It is built on a different premise than many global higher education networks. Rather than promoting a single program or model of excellence, it connects schools that share a commitment to purposeful, context-driven management education. We believe global connectivity and local impact are not competing priorities. They complement and reinforce one another, especially in generating innovation. In GBSN, diversity is a strength to cultivate.
For newer business schools, this creates a productive pathway for development. Instead of choosing between isolation and conformity, they can learn through collaboration in ways that respect and develop differences. They can draw on the experience of established institutions while remaining grounded in their local missions. While there is no single formula for how schools engage, there is a shared commitment to relevance and impact.
Take some of the new business schools connecting through GBSN for development:
- In Vietnam, VinUniversity has rapidly built a globally connected, interdisciplinary institution aligned with the needs of a dynamic innovation economy.
- The agile Baghdad Business School is addressing a critical talent gap in a context where private-sector growth and institutional rebuilding go hand in hand.
- In Morocco, the Africa Business School is focused on organizational transformation. Its work reflects a deliberate focus on sustainability, industrial development, and regional integration.
- The brand new Chișinău Business School is focusing on executive education to drive long-term prosperity in Moldova.
These young schools are committed to building for local context and impact and believe that objective is best achieved by engaging with other GBSN schools around the world. Similarly, more established GBSN members can benefit from connecting with the younger schools, which might be more innovative or agile. For example, they might learn how manage teaching loads more effectively, target a new learner segment, or identify a new retention strategy. Together our members are addressing the development needs of society and as a consequence, each is become stronger, more innovative, and impactful—and increasingly visible in a global environment.