There are plenty of options when it comes to education, specifically for high-level executives.

Consultancies, in-house academies and online platforms all promise to develop leaders, and many do it well. Yet business schools continue to win the work that organisations care about most: the bespoke programmes designed to answer a company’s defining challenges.

What sets their custom executive education apart? In conversations with four schools recognised for their custom work recently, a consistent answer is that the best programmes are not bought off a shelf; they are built together.

The schools that excel often treat custom executive education as an act of co-creation rather than just procurement. They invest heavily in design before a programme begins, placing senior faculty and client leaders side by side in the room, and measuring impact long after participants return to their desks.

Among them, SDA Bocconi, ranked number one for custom programmes in this year’s Financial Times Exec Ed ranking; INSEAD, a 2026 EFMD Excellence in Practice Silver award winner with Tech Mahindra; Aalto EE, recognised here for its work with Nordea, each illuminate a different facet of the same idea; and Durham University Business School, shortlisted in the 2025 QS Reimagine Education Awards with Nissan.

SDA Bocconi on listening and the power of research

For SDA Bocconi, the recognition by the Financial Times confirms something the school regards as fundamental. “Executive education designed for customers … is exactly our deep, deep DNA,” Dean Stefano Caselli shares. “It’s our capability to listen to customers, to design, to adapt.” The ranking, in his view, is proof of a philosophy. “We are here to listen, not to sell,” he says, “to listen and to work with you, using what business schools are uniquely able to do, which is the powerhouse of our research.”

Caselli sees two shifts reshaping the market, both of which reward partnership. The first is a growing appetite for design. “Customers want to spend much more time ex ante, together with the business school, to understand the need, to co-design,” he explains. The second is a relationship that no longer ends when the programme does: increasingly, clients want to return “six months or one year after the executive programme … to discuss together with participants -okay, what happened? What changed?” Executive education, in other words, is becoming a journey rather than an event.

It is also, he argues, where a business school offers something no other provider can. The school, in Caselli’s words, is “the bridge between the powerhouse of academic research and the understanding of the needs of the corporates and the customers”, a translator between rigorous enquiry and live business problems. That, more than any league table, is the case for choosing a business school partner.

INSEAD co-design that moves the needle

The INSEAD Velocity programme, co-created with Tech Mahindra and recognised with the 2026 EFMD Excellence in Practice Silver Award in the Professional Development category, was built to strengthen strategic sales capability, and built around live commercial work. “This wasn’t about workshops, it was about application,” says Atul Soneja, Chief Operating Officer at Tech Mahindra. Client-facing teams “received direct feedback, and were accountable for what they proposed and delivered.”

Two features stand out. An application-based journey continues after the residential teaching, and the company’s own C-suite is woven into the design. Pre- and post-programme assessments, analysed with generative AI, are used to match coaching to each leader’s needs but always, the team is careful to note, with the human in the loop. The intent is behavioural change, not box-ticking. “We don’t coach for awareness, we coach for the next client conversation,” says Ravi Bhogaraju, INSEAD Coach.

The result is a shift in how leaders see their role, from “talking about functionality and what they are selling” toward “business outcome … and business growth,” thus becoming “valued business advisors to their customers,” says Bhogaraju. As one participant Joceline Joy reflected, “Velocity helped me evolve from managing outcomes to shaping impact.”

Durham and Nissan shared teaching for lasting results

Partnership is also about who teaches. At Durham University Business School, the Launch programme built with Nissan was shortlisted in the Power of Partnerships category at the 2025 QS Reimagine Education Awards, where it ranked in the top 20% of more than 1,600 submissions.

The programme pairs the school’s faculty with Nissan’s senior executives as co-facilitators. The curriculum is deliberately agile, refined using both Durham’s pedagogical research and Nissan’s operational insight, and culminates in a “Shark Tank” where participants pitch innovations to Nissan’s leaders, who then mentor the strongest ideas forward.

The aim, as Head of Executive Education Sue Boyd describes it, is to address “the gap between academic leadership theory and practical automotive industry application,” giving leaders “frameworks to navigate technological disruption, regulatory changes, and market transformation.”

The evidence that the model sticks is striking: a 96% completion rate, a 4.74-out-of-5 rating for content relevance, and 59% of participants promoted within two years. “The creativity infused into the programme has made it engaging and impactful,” said Steven Laidlow of Nissan’s Learning & Development team, “perfectly aligning with the needs of our participants.” Tellingly, the relationship runs both ways. Nissan executives now guest-lecture across Durham’s wider programmes, while the school supports the company with research expertise.

Aalto EE and Nordea show the reach of exec ed

Impactful executive education is not limited to specific industries and corporate structures, and the partnership approach reaches further than most might assume. When Nordea wanted to deepen its lawyers’ grasp of prudential banking regulation, it turned to Aalto University Executive Education & Professional Development, even though the subject sat outside the university’s core expertise. That was the point, says Bella Sillman. “While prudential banking law is not one of Aalto University’s core areas of expertise, delivering world-class executive education is our key skill here at Aalto EE.”

Aalto tailored the programme tightly, favouring big-picture thinking over content for its own sake, pairing leading academics with Nordea’s own specialists, and ending with an evaluation. “Working with Aalto EE was a pleasure,” said Nordea’s Sakari Wuolijoki. “They were remarkably flexible throughout the entire process, adapting everything just as we hoped.”

The common thread

Four schools, all achieving enduring results and resounding client feedback through co-creation. Bocconi makes the compelling case for listening; INSEAD turns co-design into measurable commercial impact; Durham shares the teaching itself and tracks the results for years; Aalto proves the model holds even in the most specialised terrain.

What unites them is a refusal to treat executive education as a transaction. Their clients are not buying a course; they are entering a partnership, grounded in research, built on dialogue, and judged by what changes once everyone is back at work.

For additional insights, announcements and perspectives, visit the conversation on Executive Education.