IMD business school for management and leadership courses
Scale, Speed, Impact
The technology-enabled innovations introduced by IMD in 2023 have enabled us to achieve more impact, more efficiently, and at greater scale.
Thanks to these advances, we have developed highly impactful, time-effective, cost-efficient programs that create alignment across an organization and drive results at a distance, at scale, and with measurable, lasting impact.
This ability to “deploy” extensive interventions, combined with our historical strength in focused capability interventions and ability to work with top management teams, has made IMD the “go-to” partner for organizations intending to deploy a new strategy or strategic initiative.
Our new accelerated learning experience
We call these intense, blended journeys ‘Sprints’– programs mixing faculty-led virtual sessions, video modules, online exercises, and peer engagement to achieve real impact fast. Companies often try to achieve three important goals that pull against each other: impact, scale, and speed. Our Sprints, whether as open programs or co-created journeys with our clients, resolve those tensions.
Designed to maximize employee engagement, the accelerated learning experience is distilled into compact, highly engaging sessions of 1-2 hours per day, delivered online over 1-2 weeks. Sprint can onboard around 500 participants each week and reach up to 12,000 within 12 months.
In 2023, our Open Sprint programs included the Digital Transformation Sprint, Generative AI for Business Sprint, and the newly introduced Resilient Leadership Sprint.
Open Sprints
Cohorts
Reported high impact for individual/team after 4-6 months
Bayer – a co-created program cascaded to upskill at scale
In 2023, global life science, healthcare, and agriculture enterprise Bayer partnered with IMD to co-create and deploy a large-scale upskilling initiative.
The life sciences sector is currently facing a growing, aging global population, a worldwide food crisis, and the ongoing threat of the emergence of new diseases.
To tackle these challenges effectively, Bayer realized it needed to harness its workforce’s potential – especially its managers – as the guiding light for employee endeavor.
To fill these gaps and empower managers as quickly as possible, it was important to rethink the relationship between scale, speed, and impact.
Achieved through an IMD Sprint program, Bayer’s upskilling initiative reached over 12,000 people within 9-12 months – onboarding around 500 participants every week – and achieved a completion rate of 83% with measurable impact and behavioral deltas that surpassed expectations.
Bayer discovered that its workforce’s optimum daily learning period was 1-1.5 hours, spread across a two-week program. Managers were engaged through live interactive sessions every other day, which achieved an 80% live-session attendance rate.
Peer-review assignments, cutting-edge research, engaging articles, AI-enabled assessments, practical toolkits, and live discussions with in-house facilitators throughout created a fully rounded, interactive experience and helped participants take responsibility for their own learning.
A key to the success of Bayer’s upskilling at scale program was training senior managers to become in-house facilitators. Their role was to share experiences, listen to input from participants, and facilitate discussions.
Impressive completion rate and impact
The Bayer program brought out its participants’ appetite for learning. The training wasn’t mandatory, and yet, simply through word of mouth around the business, the number of participants grew from 5,000 to over 12,000.
A typical completion rate for massive open online courses (MOOCs) is around 7%, and an online program with interaction can sometimes achieve a 25% completion rate.
In comparison, an extremely impressive 83% completed Bayer’s upskilling at scale initiative. The content was accessible to employees worldwide; the training was delivered in seven languages across 95 countries and six time zones.
Top 5 leadership behaviors adopted 6 months post-Sprint
Encourage team members to share their thoughts and ideas
Give feedback to improve performance
Delegate with necessary power and freedom to make decisions
Have courageous conversations
Communicate the reason or goal behind a particular action or decision