Europe Trying to Catch Up in Teaching e-Business

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/world/europe/europe-trying-to-catch-up-in-teaching-e-business.html

Version 0 of 1.

PARIS — When Google announced this year that it would sponsor a chair at H.E.C. Paris, one of the most prestigious business schools in France, the news was welcomed by both academics and digital entrepreneurs.

The Google@HEC chair — the first direct investment by the company in a business school — is seen as a sign that Europe is finally trying to catch up with the United States in teaching digital entrepreneurship. While it is not the first European foray into this field, it comes amid the realization that universities in Europe are lagging behind their U.S. counterparts.

“We need role models for the digital economy,” said Eloïc-Anil Peyrache, an associate dean at H.E.C.

Dr. Peyrache said that students were becoming more interested in the subject. “Most of this is the willingness to open up your new company, of which two-thirds is related to the Web,” he said.

A decade ago, most of H.E.C.’s graduates would have found employment in big corporations or consulting firms, but the more recent graduates were more likely to go at it alone, he said.

The grandes écoles, the elite French schools where most corporate or government leaders are traditionally trained, have been teaching digital entrepreneurship for several years.

Business schools are seeing the urgency of building e-business curriculums and programs lest they miss out.

“In the next coming years there will be a difference in the business schools where this is worked out and those where it won’t be,” said Bernard Ramanantsoa, H.E.C.’s dean.

Essec , another grande école, started teaching “Managing IT in a Networked World” last year as part of its Global M.B.A. program, which is taught in both Paris and Singapore. The course combines the more traditional discipline of information technology management with e-business.

Peter O’Connor, who teaches the course at Essec, said it had been conceived to keep up with what he called the “digitalization” of virtually all aspects of business.

“The wide-scale acceptance of it has come in the last two or three years, as we’ve seen the value of having a digital strategy in vast amounts of businesses,” Dr. O’Connor said.

A course on e-business entrepreneurship, also in its second year at Essec, is especially popular because, together with another course on business planning, it allows students to apply to the school’s incubator, which provides start-ups with seed money and office space.

Professor Antonio Dávila, who heads the Entrepreneurship Department at the I.E.S.E. Business School , which has campuses around Spain, said that online commerce was by far the most popular post-graduate plan among his students.

“Digital entrepreneurship is what marketing was in the ’80s and ’90s and banking and consulting in the 2000s,” he said.

Part of the appeal resulted from decreasing interest in more traditional fields because of the global economic slowdown. “On the Internet, if you are successful in about five years, you’re global,” he said.

More business schools are using both traditional professors and outside experts who are well-versed in real-life changes.

This is the strategy that the Google@HEC chair employs. Instead of paying for a single professorship, as the word “chair” might suggest, Google is supplying the school with experts, both from its own ranks and from outside companies.

“What they can learn is how to actually use the practical experience of building and running an e-commerce Web site,” said Michel Bénard, who is university relations manager at Google France.

Celine Lazorthes, an H.E.C. graduate and digital entrepreneur who now mentors students at her alma mater, said that Google’s investment was a step forward.

“In France, we need to make better links with companies,” she said.

Ms. Lazorthes thinks that students, particularly those opening H.E.C.-based start-ups, can benefit from Google’s technical guidance and market data.

In Denmark, the Copenhagen Business Schools, or C.B.S., has tried to teach the subject for decades, said Jan Damsgaard, the head of the Department of IT Management.

The school was a pioneer in developing a center of electronic commerce in 1998, with a dedicated professor and a resource center, but it may have been too early for its own good. In 2005, it shut down when the dot-com bubble burst, and it never reopened.

Still, the school is considered to be on the cutting edge of including instruction on doing business online. Since last year, C.B.S. has offered a course on social media marketing. “Nowadays it is in everything,” said Dr. Damsgaard about e-business at C.B.S.

Still, the United States is far ahead in promoting Internet companies.

“If you are trying to prepare business students for the world and you are not taking into account digital technology, you are failing in your mission,” said Andrew McAfee , a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. McAfee, who teaches and researches the business effects of information technology, said U.S. schools were better placed to attract outside experts, since most of them worked in the country.

“It is easy for us to bring people into class,” he said. “High-tech is mainly centered in the States.”

Mr. O’Connor of Essec said that the United States was several years ahead of Europe and Asia, mostly because of the presence of venture capital and the positive attitude toward risk-taking, and even failure, in e-business in the United States.

“There is such a concentration of talent, money and facilities in Silicon Valley that it is going to be successful for a very long time,” he said.

However, he was optimistic about transferring that expertise across the Atlantic and around the world.

As e-businesses gain importance in places like Russia, China and India, the global expertise and demand will no longer be focused in the United States. Business school curriculums will follow the trend, he explained.

“The amount we’re trailing is definitely reducing rapidly and will disappear,” he said of European business schools.