Operations Management Teaching on European MBA Programmes

A comprehensive review of the literature established that several investigations have been made of operations management teaching in the United States, whereas almost nothing has been published on European teaching. Therefore, an exploratory investigation was made of operations management teaching on the MBA courses of ten leading European business schools. The results show that course content is similar across schools but there are large variations on three dimensions; the time allocated by schools to the subject; the balance between operations strategy and tools and techniques in teaching; and the level of emphasis given to service operations. The results also indicate the emerging importance of integrating operations management with other subjects in the MBA curriculum and the key challenge facing faculty—the need to raise the perceived the importance of operations management. The comparison of courses will be of interest to all OM faculty who teach core courses and particularly those who are looking for ideas on how to re-design courses.