By Colin Nelson
In AACSB International’s Collaborations Survey, one of the most important things we track is the degree to which our participating schools are involved with partners they name from around the world. As a reminder, in this survey we define partnerships as one-to-one connections between a pair of institutions, whereas a reported collaboration may include one or many such partnerships. Further elaboration on this and other terms used can be found in the 2012-13 Collaborations Survey Overview Report, now available to all AACSB members in the Downloads area of DataDirect.
Interestingly, institutional partners are not always who, or where, we might expect:
Figure 1. Country-Level Collaborations Statistics
While a degree of reporting bias is inevitable in surveys of this sort, I was interested to see which areas of the world had far more partnerships than others, despite hosting far fewer reporting schools overall. This is, of course, likely due to the fact that most reported partnerships are with schools outside the country of the reporting school.
Overall, only about three percent of all reported partnerships were between two institutions in the same country. Indeed, 71 percent of all the countries represented by reporting schools had no same country partnerships reported at all. Institutions in the same region are slightly more commonly paired, as about 12.3 percent of all reported partnerships were between two institutions in the same world region.
Clearly then, the data from our survey indicate that business schools are developing the overwhelming majority of their partnerships with institutions in countries and regions other than their own. One conclusion that might be drawn from this is that collaborative agreements undertaken by business schools are seen as a prime means of globalizing the scope of the management education they offer.
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