Developing imaginators not managers – How to flip the business school model

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd This experiential paper is written to provoke debate amongst deanly colleagues around the world-our location is the 130 business schools in the UK (and the 3500 plus in the world!) about how to ‘flip’ the academic model of their business schools. We make a case for this flipping by revisiting Henry Mintzberg's thesis presented in ‘Managers not MBA's in its tenth anniversary year. Ten years on we argue the case for the ‘flip’ is stronger than ever yet our progress toward it disappointing. The criticism of business schools is ever persistent and the argument for their irrelevancy seems to be strengthening. Our paper seeks to argue that much of business school practice and pedagogy is still rooted in content rather than context, where priority is given to academic knowledge in favour of practice intelligence. The ‘flip’ as we define it shifts the emphasis to the latter and helps restore business schools to the status of being relevant to business. Within this context, we provide key features of the flipped business school model for curriculum design and delivery and introduce key enablers of the flip, and we argue that deans are well placed to take this agenda forward.