HEC Paris and IBM Create MBA Curriculum

With support from IBM Corporation, HEC Paris introduces a new MBA curriculum for the 2013 academic year designed to prepare students for the growing number of careers requiring big data and analytics skills.

Through this partnership, IBM will provide HEC Paris with access to IBM’s big data and analytics software solutions, course material and IBM data scientists who will visit classes as guest lecturers and engineers.

The new MBA program from HEC aims to develop leaders who are able to identify new growth opportunities within big data – or the quintillion bytes of information generated daily from such sources as sensors, RFID networks, mobile devices and social media. Thus, students will improve their IT skills and meet analytics and data management specialists such as engineers and scientists. The first European MBA in business analytics is a result of this joint initiative.

“The development of analytics skills for business and management students has become a necessity. It deals with mixing the general MBA’s business training to more in-depth analytics and data interpretation skills in order to improve decision making and the ability to innovate,” declares associate dean for the HEC Paris MBA program Bernard Garrette.

A Lack of Analytics Skills
Nowadays, analytics skills are increasingly sought after, as employers in every industry seek out job candidates who can uncover insights from data to solve problems, act on findings, enter new markets, deepen engagement with customers.

However, there is a gap between the growing number of jobs that require data-driven skills and the available pool of job candidates who can fulfill these roles. Indeed, this abundant volume of data is far from being exploited. Only one in ten businesses has the required skills to use technology in the field of big data and analytics, according to IBM Tech Trends survey.

This lack of graduates and adequately trained professionals is hampering the adoption of new big data and analytics technologies, which in turns hinders decision making and competitive advantage.

IBM and HEC Paris implemented this new curriculum in order to meet these new academic challenges.

Students will be able to tackle complex business
and societal problems such as:

• Predicting and better understanding customers’ buying trends
• Gathering and analyzing information about competitors
• Improving online and in-store sales
• Gathering critical feedback on the success of a marketing campaign
• Analyze consumers’ feelings regarding a product or brand.

To meet these challenges, professor Pacheco de Almeida, coordinator of the MBA strategy specialization plans to develop the curriculum over the next few years through a series of new courses including strategy simulation modeling and decision models, data mining, strategy analytics, prediction, social media analytical tools, and data visualization.

“This collaboration with HEC Paris reflects IBM’s commitment to investing in higher education in order to prepare students for jobs of the future, particularly those related to big data,” explains university relations manager IBM France, Josiane Gain, who benefitted from the expertise of European big data expert at IBM Dr. Hammou Messafta.

Through this collaboration, HEC Paris is part of the IBM Academic Initiative, a no-charge program providing educators with the training materials, curriculum guides, software and hardware needed to teach in-demand business and technology skills. As part of this global program, IBM has created more than 1,000 academic partnerships focused on big data and analytics.