Can business schools really escape including cryptocurrency and blockchain in their curriculums? Speaking with Maclean’s, Associate Professor Jean-Philippe Vergne shares why he believes blockchain will become part of core business education for undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
Jean-Philippe explains that the sooner businesses schools introduce the subject into their curriculum the better placed their students will be to enter the new era of technology startups. That’s especially true of blockchain technology, the vast, decentralized databases that cryptocurrencies rely on to verify and process new transactions with a minimum of human involvement.
As the world of cryptocurrencies continues to grow and impact industries across the board, business schools are learning to focus on the principles and technologies currencies are attached to, rather than the individual currencies, which we have seen can explode and combust overnight.
As blockchain organises investment and payment in such a streamlined way, without all those intermediaries, Vergne thinks it has the potential to shake up organisation theory and how it’s taught. “It changes what we know about the role of managerial hierarchies and centralized coordination in the growth of business organizations,” he says. “This is where most of the exciting research is happening these days.”
