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Stanford University
Graduate School of Business

518 Memorial Way
Stanford, CA 94305
United States

In the school's own words...

At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, students learn to think creatively to solve problems. Stanford’s history as a university is all about innovation and forward thinking—from pioneering education and entrepreneurship in the West to sowing the seeds of Silicon Valley. Stanford MBA students learn to translate ideas into workable solutions for complex problems such as global poverty, human health, and the environment. These are problems that increasingly can only be met with social innovation—novel solutions that cut across corporate, nonprofit, and government sectors.

At the Business School, a great deal of momentum has built around 1) the new MBA curriculum launched in 2007, 2) a commitment to collaborative learning with students and faculty within the Business School and across Stanford, and 3) an expansive new $350 million campus under construction. The result is a highly personalized and engaging learning experience with more global content and expanded leadership development. The new campus, which will be a collection of eight buildings around three quadrangles to open in 2010-2011, is expected to achieve the highest LEED Platinum certification for environmental sustainability from the U.S. Green Building Council. The School has made a commitment to both teaching sustainability and living it.

At Stanford, issues related to corporate responsibility and social impact are integrated throughout the required curriculum as well as in electives. The curriculum includes cases on international bribery, genetic testing, Enron, pollution permits, sourcing products in developing countries, and microfinance in Africa, to name a few examples of issues that have social impact. One of the hallmarks of the new curriculum, a Critical Analytical Thinking course for all first-year students, pushes students to think deeply and to develop, hold, and articulate a position in a group of just 16 people who perform as they might have to in a work team or on a board of directors examining a difficult long-term issue. Topics include “Alleviating Global Poverty” and “Who Killed the Electric Car?”

The Center for Social Innovation at the Graduate School of Business provides a critical mass of support to sustain research, MBA course development, and executive education short courses such as Business Strategies for Environmental Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility: Strategic Integration and Competitiveness. Among its many corporate and student activities, the Center cohosts a Socially and Environmentally Responsible Supply Chain Conference with the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum each spring. Its 37-year-old Public Management Program offers an MBA certificate program in socially responsible business, hosts numerous speakers and panels, manages six service learning trips annually, and supports an annual Public Management Initiative student project on topics such as “Inclusive Development: Making Markets Work.”

The School continues to develop new courses that encourage good corporate citizenship among for-profit managers, strengthen the management knowledge and resources of nonprofit organizations and philanthropists, and recognize the role of public policy. By addressing these three areas concurrently, students begin to envision the role of business as a social institution and the potential for achieving social change and solutions.

School Demographic Information