Hult International Business School

History

The Management Education Institute, later the Arthur D. Little School of Management, was founded in 1964 by Arthur D. Little Inc, the world's oldest management consulting firm. The institution developed a one-year postgraduate degree program in management that was launched as the school's first program. Only five years earlier, in 1959, the Ashridge Management College was established in the United Kingdom. Among Ashridge's initial partners were companies like Shell, Guinness and Unilever. Ten years later, in 1969, Ashridge had expanded its operations to include more than 100 programs and more than 2,000 annual participants. Arthur D. Little School of Management was accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges in 1976, allowing for higher academic integrity in a city where universities like Harvard had thrived for more than a century.

Because of financial difficulties, the school was acquired by Bertil Hult and renamed Hult International Business School in 2003. The school was going to build on a new concept, with an international focus. The goal was to open new campuses around the world and accept international students from countries around the world in order to establish a learning environment that let its students not only learn about business from the school's professors, but also about each other's cultures. In 2008, Hult opened its first campus outside the United States in Dubai, U.A.E. Only a year later, the school also opened a campus in London. In 2010, Hult opened its second campus in the United States, in downtown San Francisco. Finally, in 2011, Hult opened a campus in Shanghai, China.

In 2015, Hult International Business School and Ashridge Business School operationally merged under the common brand Hult International Business School. Ashridge Business School was renamed Ashridge Executive Education, Hult.

Postgraduate rankings

Hult is ranked 55th in the world by The Economist and 62nd by Bloomberg Businessweek.

In 2015, Hult was unranked in the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking due to a change in a metric in the Financial Times' methodology. The metric that was changed was "International Experience", a category that Hult normally perform well in. In the 2014 ranking, Hult ranked #2 in that category. The metric determines a score based on the percentage of graduates that had completed exchanges, research projects, study tours and company internships in countries other than where the school is based.

Undergraduate rankings

Hult's Undergraduate program appeared in Bloomberg's Undergraduate Business School ranking, as its first appearance in any undergraduate ranking, in 2016. The school was ranked as #124 in the United States. However, this ranking was only based upon the graduating class of 2015 from the London campus. The program has only been present in the United States since the 2014–15 academic year.

Executive Education rankings

Ashridge's Executive Education was ranked #7 in "Best Custom Programs Globally" by Bloomberg Businessweek in 2013. In 2015, the programs were ranked #21 in "Best Executive Education Programs Globally, Combined Rankings" by the Financial Times.

Hult Faculty

Initiatives

Hult International Business School is the lead sponsor of the Hult Prize (formerly Hult Global Case Challenge), an annual international case competition launched in 2010 that asks students to find solutions to global social challenges. The Prize is a partnership between Hult International Business School and the Clinton Global Initiative. Bill Clinton selects the challenge topic and announces the winner each September. Clinton mentioned the Hult Prize in a TIME Magazine article about "the top 5 ideas that are changing the world for the better."

Teams from business schools around the world compete at one of five regional events to develop the best solutions to that year's social challenge. The best teams from each regional event advance to a global final, at which a single winning team is chosen. Bertil Hult provided a $1 million cash grant to the partner NGO to help fund the winning solution in 2010, 2011 and 2012. In 2013 he will instead provide the same cash grant for the winning team to establish a new social enterprise.

In 2010, the competition focused on education in partnership with One Laptop per Child. The 2011 event partnered with Matt Damon's water.org to focus on provision of clean water. In 2012, Hult Prize partnered with Habitat for Humanity, One Laptop Per Child and SolarAid to address global poverty through the provision of education, housing and energy.

The 2013 Hult Prize was won by a team from McGill University headed by MD / MBA Student Mohammed Ashour. The team continues to implement their idea of growing edible insects for food and feed under the name Aspire^[13] The company is based out of Montreal, Canada, and has active operations in Ghana, Mexico, and the United States.

The Hult Prize 2014 was won by a team from the Indian School of Business, called NanoHealth. NanoHealth specialises in chronic disease management and provides holistic and affordable healthcare at the doorstep. NanoHealth creates a network of community health workers called 'Saathis' and equips them with a low-cost point-of-care device called the Doc-in-a-Bag. NanoHealth aims to avoid more than a million pre-mature deaths every year by providing affordable healthcare at the door step of the urban poor.

Business Professor of the Year Award

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), supported by Hult International Business School, launched the Business Professor of the Year Award in 2012.