Says Professor Christopher Tucci, who recently founded the Centre for Digital Transformation at Imperial College Business School and teaches an innovative new MBA module, AI Ventures

The past few years have seen extraordinary changes across every facet of society and business, driven in a large part by the global pandemic. Digital technologies have been front and centre of that change. Indeed, a McKinsey Global Survey of executives in 2020 found that companies’ overall adoption of digital technologies had sped up by three to seven years in a span of months.

“We’ve all adopted new practices, new products, new services, new business models and new ways of working and I don’t think any of those things are going to be going away, we’re not going to roll back to what we did before,” says Christopher Tucci, Professor of Digital Strategy and Innovation at Imperial College Business School.

That presents both a challenge and opportunity for businesses. Faced with an array of potential technology avenues—from artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things to blockchain—business leaders can feel either paralysed or pushed into doing the wrong thing.

Yet the need to act is clear. A subsequent McKinsey survey in 2021 found the pandemic has fundamentally changed the pace of business and that companies with superior technology capabilities were ‘winning the race’.

The same challenges and opportunities await tomorrow’s business leaders, who may well have to contend with an even more daunting array of technologies, including powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI), the quantum internet and metaverses.

Navigating the digital transformation

Against this backdrop, the founding of the new Centre for Digital Transformation (CDT) at Imperial College Business School feels particularly timely. Positioned at the meeting point between industry and academia, the CDT will support and facilitate research projects that help organisations take advantage of digital technologies, to better meet their business and wider social objectives.

As Professor Tucci explains: “We’re trying to demystify things a little and understand how organisations need to change, from different angles. That might range from, for example, how you work, to what your strategy is, to what your external offering is. It’s something that a lot of companies are grappling with right now.”

Crucially, research and innovation from the CDT will feed into Imperial’s Full-Time MBA and Global Online MBA programmes, enabling industry professionals to better understand digital transformation and utilise new technology within their working lives. 

Breaking down traditional silos

“It’s about the pipeline, our future business leaders. You need to have different skillsets to navigate this digital transformation and that’s one of the reasons why we’ve developed a new module, AI Ventures,” says Chris. In the spirit of cross-disciplinary teaching, AI Ventures is the first ever module at Imperial that takes enrolments for credit from both students on the Full-Time MBA programme at the Business School and students pursuing an MSc in Computing in Imperial’s Faculty of Engineering.

AI Ventures is a project-based, team-oriented module, where students explore applications of artificial intelligence technologies that will improve or transform existing financial, health and other systems by building new business models, products or technical concepts. It is part of a wider initiative at Imperial called I-X, which aims to redesign the university structure, breaking down traditional silos and disciplines whilst making it as easy as possible to work closely with industry—from large corporations to startups.

“It’s great to have these groups of students brainstorming and thinking about problems that could be solved using some form of AI and how they might develop that into a reasonable business case. You need to have this combination of skills to do that, which is quite unique,” says Professor Tucci.

Over the duration of the module, students are exposed to key ideas, principles and frameworks from CEOs of leading startups, corporate leaders and Imperial academics who are leading research in the future of AI. 

One recent speaker on the AI Ventures module was Melissa Menke, Venture Partner at Assiduity Capital and Founder/CEO of Access Afya – an innovative startup aiming to transform the delivery of primary healthcare in Africa with digital and telemedicine solutions.

Full-Time MBA candidates are also encouraged to develop ideas that have positive environmental and social impact through the Imperial Innovation Challenge. This is essentially an intensive, one-week accelerator, which draws in ideas from across Imperial’s faculties, including Medicine and Engineering, as well as some partner organisations.

Indeed, the 2021 edition of the challenge saw Imperial MBA students working alongside peers from the Royal College of Art (RCA) to develop commercial propositions for sustainable and social technologies ranging from permeable concrete to smart crutches.

MBA candidate Seerat Sindhu commented on the experience: “The RCA students provided a crucial creative angle to the problems posed, while us MBA students leveraged our practical and business skills to tackle the brief. Throughout the challenge, the teams worked hard with our clients (the tech developers) to design a new problem-solution statement for the innovation.”

Imperial now plans to roll out electives on digital transformation and digital strategy across the entire suite of MBA programmes, as well as an Executive Education offering.

“It’s something that MBA candidates have really, really wanted for a number of years now: this connection and exposure to what’s happening in the rest of the campus and the world-class offering there,” says Professor Tucci.

Imperial College Business School is also helping to deliver an elective module for all undergraduates studying at Imperial focused on co-creation in robotics and AI, with a strong emphasis on the social dimensions of technology.

All this is helping to lay the foundations to prepare the multidisciplinary business leaders of the future who can ensure that digital transformation benefits both the economy and wider society.