Global Alliance with Oxford Brookes University Business School

Brookes - Burgundy Alliance Press Event from OBU Faculty of Business on Vimeo.

Oxford Brookes University Business School and Burgundy School of Business have been working in partnership since 2008 and have forged an innovative strategic alliance with the objective of developing a truly European Business School experience.

• Achieve a deep and effective international academic partnership;
• Achieve recognition of the two schools as distinctive European contributors to business and management education;
• Contribute to the economic competitiveness of the European Union; 
• Achieve distinctiveness through close and multi-point integration of curriculum design, programme delivery and research.

Background

These two institutions are similarly sized Business Schools with similar ethos and ambition. They have complementary areas of expertise in student experience, teaching and learning, and corporate relationships. Both Schools are seeking to enhance their research profiles, strengthen their corporate links and offer genuinely international curricula as a platform to enhance their international reputation and to enrich their students’ international experience.

This alliance is an opportunity to develop a new networking model for  European business education that will make the schools distinctive in both domestic and international markets and effectively serve the Anglo French business community.

Current projects

Joint projects have been chosen to integrate and internationalise the schools at a number of points involving core activities and common areas of interest:

• Governance – Our Deans are members of each other’s School Advisory Boards. We hold strategic planning meetings between our senior management teams twice a year and we are committed to an overarching governance model.

• Joint international programmes – We have designed joint programmes, one at the Bachelor and one at the Master level, to be launched in September 2010. Academic programme teams share delivery, assessment and administration while students study in both schools, giving faculty and students a genuinely international experience. Inter-scholar projects including field trips and exchanges have been undertaken by various groups of staff and students. These typs of projects involving teams of students from both schools are built into the new programmes.

• Doctoral programmes – Academic staff from both schools will work together as co-supervisors of doctoral students at Oxford Brookes Business School and participate in an annual summer school.

• Research – Our Heads of Research are members of each School’s Research Committee and facilitate opportunities to develop joint projects between individual researchers, including joint bidding for projects. We will hold our first joint internal research conference in 2010.

• Corporate links – Both schools have significant corporate links  and this partnership is intended to build and develop relationships with Anglo/French corporate companies. The European Commission will work with the schools and support this partnership.

The future

By developing this networked partnership model involving close co-operation in selected activities and at all levels in our schools, we hope these joint projects will act as an incubator for further internationalisation and integration in the future.

Find more about Oxford Brookes University Business School