Research notes Management relevance in a business school setting: A research note on an empirical investigation Charles McMillan a , Jeffrey Overall b, * a Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada b School of Business, Nipissing University, Canada article info Article history: Received 10 August 2015 Received in revised form 13 February 2016 Accepted 14 April 2016 Available online 27 April 2016 Keywords: MBA Business schools Wicked problems Conventional problems Management education relevance abstract In this research note, we address wicked problems within the context of business schools. Our aim is to understand if business schools fully reflect the needs of business. To achieve this, we assess the mission, vision, and stated strategies of the top 200 global business schools to determine if the MBA curriculum addresses wicked problems. From our find- ings, we demonstrate that the MBA curriculum does not address the nature of wicked problems or provide the intellectual and interdisciplinary frameworks to educate man- agers on serious competitive issues in a global context. In addition to challenging many premises of the MBA curriculum, we outline several areas of opportunities to assist business schools in adapting to the evolving needs of business and organizational prob- lem-solving. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The American model of MBA schools remains the main vehicle to train managers around the globe. Publicly-funded universities, private universities, or even stand-alone MBA schools are scrambling to recruit faculty, develop course mate- rials, and apply the teaching tools e course syllabi, case studies, journal reprints, and textbooks. Public rankings of MBA schools by the leading publications like Business Week, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, despite shifts, all show an unequivocal positioning of the leading US business schools. In the Financial Times 2014 ratings, to cite one example, seven of the top 10, 12 of the top 20, and 30 of the top 50 were American business schools. However, for over a decade, MBA schools have faced a paradoxical challenge. Despite rapid growth, high fragmentation of the business school industry and research output in academic journals, business schools are under intense scrutiny by the public at large, key decision-makers in business and government, and the business schools themselves (Datar, Garvin, & Collen, 2010). According to Rubin and Dierdorff (2013), researchers have largely argued that the MBA curriculum is either deficient or contaminated. It has been suggested that business schools are too focused on scientific, abstract research and not focused enough on practical knowledge that can be generalized and used by practitioners (Datar et al., 2010; Kuchinke, 2007; Rubin & Dierdorff, 2013; Rynes & Bartunek, 2013). To counter this issue, there have been calls for greater focus on applied research that can be used by practitioners (Knight et al., 2008). In the curriculum, there is a lack of focus on problem solving, decision-making, globalization, or even sustainability. As a result of this deficiency, graduates care less about sustainability issues, which conflicts with the movement of the global * Corresponding author. E-mail address: jeffreyo@nipissingu.ca (J. Overall). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect The International Journal of Management Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijme http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2016.04.005 1472-8117/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. The International Journal of Management Education 14 (2016) 187e197