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GOTO: the future of energy

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GOTO: the future of energy

GOTO: the future of energy

Mon, 28 January 2019

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Oxford MBA’s flagship programme powers up for 2019

On 14 January MBA candidates took a short walk from the School to a conference centre situated along one of Oxford’s scenic waterways. Their route took them past a disused power station, which will soon be transformed into the School’s Global Leadership Centre. As they neared their destination, they crossed a bridge opposite a recently built turbine generator, which harvests the water’s energy for use in the surrounding community.

The purpose of their journey? To begin Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford (GOTO), the Oxford MBA’s flagship programme designed to create a collaborative community that can tackle world scale problems. Each year students are tasked with a different problem to solve and assigned tutors from across the broader university, who aid and assess their work.

In 2019, MBA candidates will explore perhaps the most urgent problem of all: the future of energy.

Energy is interconnected with so many of the grand challenges we face as a society.

The programme is co-convened this year by Departmental Research Lecturer in Innovation and Enterprise Aoife Brophy Haney and Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Peter Drobac.

Drobac, a global health physician and social entrepreneur, is ensuring the students are equipped with the complex problem-solving skills necessary to navigate the task.

‘What we really want to see from students is a focus on the diagnosis rather than the prescription, if you’ll excuse the medical metaphor,’ he said. ‘We are asking our students to focus their energies on understanding the system, understanding the problem and mapping it out to see where the leverage points for change are.’

As an expert in sustainable energy and technology, Haney has taken the lead in developing the module materials related to the energy theme and has brought in expert tutors and industry practitioners.

‘I’ve been drawing on research and teaching from my Oxford colleagues at the Smith School, the Transport Studies Unit, the Environmental Change Institute and the Engineering and Physics departments, to name just a few,’ explained Haney, who holds a joint position at Saïd Business School with the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

But why should MBA students – the majority of whom will pursue careers outside the energy sector – think about the future of energy?

‘Energy is interconnected with so many of the grand challenges we face as a society,’ replied Haney. ‘Regardless of the industry they go into, the students will be impacted by it.’

‘We know fossil fuels are changing our climate,’ added Drobac, whose work as a global health physician was fundamental to the transformation of Rwanda’s health system. ‘But it’s the poorest parts of the world that are hit the hardest. This can cause backsliding in terms of losing some of the gains we’ve made in health care, education and economic development. Climate change has become such a large and pressing problem that it dwarfs just about everything else, and it’s vital our MBA candidates understand it.’

As well as convening tutors, Haney and Drobac have brought in two former MBA students – Eva Hoffmann and Olya Krestyaninova, to draw on their expertise in systems design and programme development and to learn from their first-hand experiences of the GOTO programme, which they completed in 2018.

‘We reached out to our former classmates and asked them about the challenges they faced in terms of balancing their work load. As a result of the changes we have suggested I believe MBAs will find an improved layout to the programme this year,’ said Krestyaninova, a former sustainability education programme developer.

‘As they progress through the programme, we hope students learn to ask the right questions and bring the right people in,’ added Hoffmann, a design engineer who works within the energy space. ‘Most importantly, we want students to feel they can jump into these intractable problems and find a path forward.’

Back at the GOTO launch, Peter Tufano, Peter Moores Dean and Professor of Finance, addressed a packed hall to explain the importance of the programme and its unique position among business schools.

‘Nobody else does what we're doing,’ he said. ‘MBAs and business leaders in general are the most elite folks in the world. They control resources, they control organisations and those organisations employ people. If business is not solving some of these problems, especially in the world that we live in today, then they will not be solved... and if you read the climate reports, I don't think that this is a problem that we can wait another 15 or 20 years to address.’

A keynote speech by Electron CEO Paul Massara followed. The MBAs were then presented with the four ‘tracks’ that they could choose to base their project on: Energy Supply, Energy Demand Energy Access and the Water-Energy-Food-Nexus. After making their choice, the candidates were split into groups of six.

The teams will work towards the GOTO summit in May, when select groups will present their findings to a panel of leaders from both industry and academia.