Introducing hyper specialisation

In September this year, the first cohort of students will begin their MBA Health at UCL (University College London) Global Business School for Health. The notion was floated by a London strategy consultant in 2016. “The idea of a specialist business school is quite daunting – it might be the university’s cash cow and the idea that you’d exclude some areas was very uncomfortable,” says the new school’s director, Professor Nora Ann Colton. “UCL is very interdisciplinary and more than half the research here is in the areas of health, life sciences and medical sciences.”

Colton says the drivers underpinning the school include the high percentage of countries’ GDP that goes to fund healthcare, the world’s ageing population and supporting the UN’s sustainable development goal’s aspiration of universal healthcare coverage. As well as the MBA, there’s a suite of executive education courses on the business side of healthcare, such as commercialising startups and advancing digital health. “The ability to innovate and think differently and reimagine healthcare is really challenging in systems that have lots of rigidity and barriers to entry.”

The school has built its MBA course from the ground up. “Other MBAs don’t cut it for the health sector,” says Colton. “We cannot go in and teach our students about Netflix and expect them to interpret that for healthcare. I asked myself questions like, ‘Can we use Porter’s Five Forces in a healthcare setting?’ No. So what does that mean? Who are they competing with in the public health sector? These are important questions to get the buy-in from health professionals and make substantive change.”