The New International: The end of internationalisation as we know it?

Internationalisation has been at the heart of business and management education for decades. The ability to collaborate with institutions outside your home country, bring visiting academic staff, send students for exciting exchanges, run summer schools, we have done it all.
Internationalisation as we know it has been, so far, mainly defined and measured by the statistics related to numbers of international students, numbers of international staff and numbers of students on exchange programmes. In addition, we would also measure our success related to the impact of collaborative international research or the amount of research funding allocated to international projects.
On a personal level, internationalisation has meant friends for life, sharing food and family photos and simply enjoying each other’s company. So, is this concept of internationalisation based on people movement gone for good?
The pandemic has accelerated much-needed thinking about the net-zero global agenda and sustainability of how we manage organisations and our economy. The business world has significantly changed the practices around global cooperation and transferred to successful virtual engagement with multiple time zones working in tandem. Business and management schools have also adapted quickly to this style of working and we would all agree it has created new opportunities and challenges.
Many schools have started to rethink and reimagine the paradigm of internationalisation and we are certainly not short of innovative ideas. At the EFMD Masters conference in December 2020, we have given these themes real thought because they are truly keeping us awake at night. Here is the summary of our discussions:
1. The end of student mobility?
Gabi Helfert, Rotterdam School of Management
2. Internationalisation post COVID – a huge opportunity?
Janicke Rasmussen, Norwegian Business School
3. Bring your Mum to business school
Radka Newton, Lancaster University Management School
So, there you have it – three possible concepts proposed and discussed by leading European business schools. Feasible, innovative, daring? We are at the beginning of the process to propose a successful future concept of internationalisation and hopefully, it will become more flexible and fluid, we will embrace a variety of options to educate even more responsible management graduates with sustainability in the forefront. For now, there are still many unknowns that we as a business school community want to address.