After having been a professor at Carnegie Mellon and dean of Imperial College in London, Francisco Veloso will head INSEAD from September 2023.

 On 4 and 5 April, INSEAD brought together more than 1,000 graduates, economic decision-makers and researchers in Amsterdam for its annual European Alumni Forum to reflect on the major challenges that will shape the future of our planet. This was an opportunity to meet the dean of the prestigious institution, Francisco Veloso, who gives us his analysis of the world of business schools at a crucial time for them, and looks back at his school’s model?

• Interview by Olivier Rollot and Jack Pettifer

You’ve worked in prestigious institutions before, and on both sides of the Atlantic, but what specifically led you to INSEAD ?

From the beginning, I really felt like INSEAD made sense for me, both in terms of the timing and the fit. Given my own global trajectory, there was a strong cultural match with the school, and I felt I could really bring what the school was looking for. Then there is the prestige of the institution, as well as the strength of its research, it’s executive education, and its students. The opportunity came at a time when I was looking to take on a more significant role, and I also had some personal connections with INSEAD: several of my friends are INSEAD alumni (students and faculty), and my father even took an executive education course here for a few weeks!

What is your reading of recent geopolitical events are their impact on the higher education system and on INSEAD?

It’s complicated for all of us in the higher education system. If we take recent events in the USA and the concerns the current administration appears to have regarding the way universities conduct their activities, we see that there are already reverberations at a domestic level. These types of changes tend to have a wider impact; we’ve seen in the UK, for example, how post-Brexit changes to student visa policy this have impacted postgraduate student mobility. Indeed, this general trend towards more restrictive visa policies has implications in terms of international student mobility, and an adverse impact on our creation of a globalised and interchangeable learning environment.

That said, INSEAD is by nature a global institution and that will not change. Our commitment is to our identity; we bring together students from all over the world in an environment where they can from each other, and learn to respect, value and embrace diversity, and that has a profound impact on the world.  If we look back, INSEAD was created in 1957, during a very different period of history, where closed borders were much more prevalent than today. When the world appears to be closing, the role and identity of INSEAD shines brighter because of how we view the world.

The behaviour of our students provides an interesting barometer; they are highly agile and go where the opportunities are, and this provides interesting observations into the areas we can consider to be open for global business. For instance, the last few years have seen the rise of our United Arab Emirates campus as a destination for students, alongside our traditional axis of London and Singapore. The UAE is growing fast, it’s open to international executives and represents an interesting opportunity for business graduates.

Where do INSEAD students come from?

INSEAD has always been an international school. At the beginning, there were many French, German and British students, but we also had American students too. Today, we have students from 80 different countries and no single nationality exceeds 10% of the total student body; it’s been like that for the past 30 years and it’s what makes us the most international school. Over the last 10 years we’ve seen large enrolment growth amongst Indian and Chinese students, and these nationalities currently represent around 10% of total INSEAD enrolment, and then there are many nationalities representing from 4 to 7% of total enrolment, so people really come to INSEAD from all over the world.

We’ve already spoken about geopolitical factors, but what about the impact of other major trends like AI and sustainability?

As an intellectually led school, we take sustainability very seriously. We look at science and at what it tells us, and we understand the need for a more sustainable and climate friendly world, which also includes social considerations.  Our last fundraising campaign, Force for Good, was focused around how business should be a driving force in creating a more sustainable world. Sustainability continues to be an important research topic for us, and, as a pressing global issue, we need to contribute to it in a meaningful way. Our position is scientific and not political, and the science is non equivocal.

In practice, we have many award-winning research faculty who study supply chains, humanitarian risk logistics, sustainable business models, sustainable consumption, regulatory elements, etc. We also revised our curriculum 2 years ago and we now have sustainability-related learning goals across our 14 core courses, we adjusted the students’ capstone project to include sustainability questions, we offer electives in sustainability, and we also integrate the topic into our executive programme and the work we do alongside businesses. The feedback from students has been very positive.

Regarding AI, some of our faculty have been working in this field for up to 30 years, and several for at least 10 years. They focus on how organisations do things differently because of AI, how machine learning and AI are changing operations and decision-making, they also study entrepreneurship, for instance comparing the performance of AI-native organisation to their non-AI native peers. There’s currently a lot of discussion around specific large language models, but regardless of the tool, AI is significantly changing how businesses are organised. Above all, as a business school, we look at organisations and try to understand, and help the world understand, what works and what doesn’t, in order to train leaders to be more effective in the current environment.

I believe that the intelligence revolution will be deeper than the industrial revolution, and that AI will enable a new golden age of entrepreneurship. Many new firms will be created and will change the way we do things, just as was the case on the on eve of the industrial revolution. So, we need to prepare students, who are future leaders, to be at forefront of this change, and to understand the associated opportunities but also responsibilities. Indeed, AI brings questions, and we need to think about what it is to be responsible in this new environment. We aim to forge a new set of leaders, capable of looking at AI and technology with a human-centric view.

Indeed, AI impacts business and society, and so we need to bring that into our educational offering. We already offer a large range of AI electives, and we’re now looking to bring that into the core curriculum. AI offers a powerful opportunity to offer a more engaging form of education, bringing the classroom even closer to business environment and in a way that is curated by our faculty. At INSEAD, we’re known for being at the forefront of teaching and incorporating the latest trends into our executive offering.

Finally, at INSEAD we also leverage AI in the way we operate as an organisation, whether that be in terms of marketing, careers, class scheduling, or HR. We’ve spent a lot of time as an organisation thinking about how AI can support and enable our operations; we take a strategic approach to this and identify the most significant business cases in which we want to invest.

AACSB have recently made some changes to their guidelines in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion. How will INSEAD be impacted by this?

I don’t think so. We’ve always had a very active diversity policy, and it’s important for us to represent diversity in all its forms and at all levels within our school. We thrive on that. Our job is to bring these diverse students together and bring the best out of them. It’s unfortunate that diversity is being politicised, and that it’s become an arm wrestle between political factions, but we don’t see it affecting our own trajectory, and our approach to diversity predates current discussions on the topic and will continue to be present once these discussions have subsided.

What role do alumni play in the INSEAD model?

Alumni are an essential part of our community. Indeed, when people ask me about the most significant differences between INSEAD and other business schools, I often talk about executive education, which represent 50% of our activity, and the global nature of our school.  But I also talk about our alumni. INSEAD defies the stereotype that students feel most attached to the school where they spent most of their time. Students typically stay 10-11 months with us, but I’ve never seen such a level of attachment between students and to the school as at INSEAD.

We currently have around 70,000 alumni, representing 172 nationalities, and 50 national alumni societies across the globe.  It’s not just the profile of our graduates and their career outcomes, but also how much they stay connected and give back to the school. For instance, one alumnus has created an ‘AI network’ with 1 500 alumni members. Every day, 20 to 30 alumni from all over world organise discussions for INSEAD alumni on this subject.  Our alumni also give generously in terms of fundraising.  These donations are very important, as it requires significant resources to stay competitive with the Wharton, Harvard, MIT.

In short, we have a very active, highly impactful alumni community who are generous to each other and to the school. That makes us very proud.