A call for university-based business schools to “lower their walls” : collaborating with other academic departments in pursuit of social value

Business schools should engage more with disruptive developments or “grand challenges” in the socio-economic world, such as financial crises and their economic and societal effects (Starkey, 2015), climate change, migration, and the global gap between rich and poor (McKiernan & Wilson, 2014). They need to think ‘bigger’ and in a more creative and holistic manner than many Schools do at the moment. Traditional business school structures should be broken down and eimagined for more open and collaborative behaviors with greater reach, respect and relevance in addressing these grand challenges (Carlile et al., 2016). Taking this broad theme, we will here specifically argue that business schools should “lower their walls” to collaborate more with other academic departments and embed their research based activity more deeply within the wider university in pursuit of these worthy and inspiring ‘grand challenges’. They should, in our view, also develop forms of management education and research that benefit the public interest, as well as private corporate interests (Morsing & Rovira, 2013; Muff, Dyllick, Drewell, North, Shrivastava, & Haertle, 2013; Starkey, Hatchuel, & Tempest, 2009).