Pixel International Conferences

Traditional business teaching lacks relevance for professional practice and therefor practitioners’ engagement in its formal learning and assessment processes should be proposed. However, business accreditation standards widely rule out their involvement and, as a consequence, professionals’ engagement in higher education has only been researched marginally.

Experiential knowledge creation networks, business educator-practitioner networks, as the synthesis of connectivist and experiential forms of knowledge development, might be supportive in order to improve business education’s practical relevance: they engage practitioners in collaborative learning communities and are integrated into higher education’s formal business learning, teaching and assessment processes.

The presentation illustrates preliminary findings of a case study, conducted at a Swiss Business School. The research examines, how professionals in experiential knowledge creation networks effectively promote business students’ practical management skills development and shall guide business educators how to practically institutionalize them in order to improve practical relevance and congruence of business school programmes.