Saturday, December 02, 2006

A Syllabus for the Service Economy


IBM is in partnership with major university business schools to prepare students for real world applications in the service economy. This brief interview is a great example of the new growth theory that we have discussed previously.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is very smart. this will make people be more productive when they come right out of college. this will not only effect production levels but also demand for the people who have taken the courses that teach the skills that are needed. and even though they arent driectly admiting that they are trying to form a demand for their product their actions are showing otherwise. they are giving software and some of the IBM people to the universities to teach how to do things with the IBM products. it is a brillent move that is setting up a market for their product. the millions they are 'investing' into the universities is more or an advertising campain.

Anonymous said...

Wow. Talk about applying the new growth theory to real life. IBM has realized that service is what Americans need to be more productive in, and they're doing what they can to make this so. IBM is investing big money to influence academic curriculum so when students graduate, they'll know exactly what kind of skills IBM needs and they will know exactly how to do what they want. This is a very good way to increase human capital, but I'm not sure how I would feel if there was a private company determining aspects of my education. Sure it may be economically beneficial, but it seems a little too structured to me. Yes, universities and businesses do need to interact for education to be funded, but I feel that many companies will follow IBM's trend to directly influence how students are taught, which seems to sort of be crossing the line for me. Oh well, good thing I'm not going to be an engineer.