IMD’s innovative use of technology in advancing management education has been recognized with two awards at the QS Reimagine Education Awards and Conference in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
The implementation of OWP+GPT at IMD’s signature program, Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP), received a bronze award for “Best Use of Generative AI”, while another bronze was awarded to the IMD Sprint learning experience in the “Innovation in Business Education” category.
The QS Reimagine Education Awards 2023 distributed a total of 36 awards – three for each of the 12 categories – out of more than 1,200 submissions from across 85 countries.
“If there’s one area in which we are particularly proud of being recognized, it is innovation,” says David Bach, Dean of Innovation and Programs. “The constant improvement of the learning experience is one of the hallmarks of our culture at IMD, whether it is by being first-adopters of new technologies – such as generative AI – or by coming up with pioneering formats to drive impact at scale, like IMD Sprints.”
The awarded projects
With OWP+GPT – rolled out for the 450 participants of OWP in Lausanne in June – IMD developed a tailored and refined application of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4, which had been released just three months before.
Having been developed by a team under the guidance of Chief Learning Innovation Officer Sarah Toms, IMD’s ChatGPT answered participants’ questions after a particular session had finished, drawing on information from the session as well as previously uploaded documents. For weeks after a session had ended, participants could keep engaging with the content, tailoring insights to their industry or business context. “The beauty of projects like this lies not in the tools, but in what they can unlock: in this case, personalized, interactive education at scale,” says Bach.
Besides that, participants were also invited to share their insights and reflections about the program in the form of prompts for the GenAI-powered image generator DALL-E. The result was a fascinating art gallery depicting the collective learning during that week of OWP.
Sprints, on the other hand, are IMD’s answer to the complicated equation of offering in-depth learning at a fast pace and providing full flexibility. Led by IMD’s Director of Programs and Learning Design, Paul Hunter, they are online programs delivered in short, highly engaging sessions – both live and pre-recorded – with a total time commitment of one to two hours per day, over two weeks.
Besides offering an effective learning journey for busy executives who want to refresh their knowledge, the Sprint format allows programs to be swiftly rolled out at scale within companies. “With one of our clients, we upskilled 14,000 people over the course of just six months. In a rapidly changing world, reaching and aligning this many employees in a company via a bespoke learning solution led by IMD faculty can make a real difference with tangible business results,” says Bach.
The QS Reimagine Education Awards, sometimes referred to as “the Oscars of education”, have been awarded annually since 2015.
