Four steps to design the perfect business school alliance

Global airline alliances offer a clear model for business schools. No single carrier could efficiently serve the world; coordinated partnerships expand reach, share risk and improve the customer experience without excessive capital investment. 

Business schools could address their own ambitions to grow and internationalise in a similar fashion. After all, many of us share these aspirations as well as goals of digitalisation, sustainability, AI expertise and lifelong learning. Likewise, we have common vulnerabilities – to geopolitical volatility and constraints on student mobility, among others. Network models can both distribute and address risk while strengthening the overall value proposition. Yet at the institutional level, strategy is often developed within the boundaries of a single school.

Why duplicate when we can collaborate?

Alliances already answer this question. The Future of Management Education (FOME) Alliance, Global Network for Advanced Management and CEMS, for example, function as higher education equivalents of airline alliances. They enable students to take courses and electives across institutions, creating a broader, more resilient and more immersive international learning experience than any single school can deliver alone. When alliances are built with precision, the strategic upside is substantial. 

• How business schools could lead the charge to revive faith in higher education
• How business schools can produce globally minded graduates
• Three ways to optimise your business school’s AI-related offering

Over the past decade as dean, however, I have learned that collaboration also brings complexity. Alignment takes time. Governance can multiply. Compromise can be painfully inevitable. For deans, associate deans for internationalisation and partnership directors, collaboration requires deliberate design. When structured carefully, alliances can extend reach, deepen expertise and strengthen resilience. When approached loosely, they add governance layers without generating material value.

The challenge for leadership teams is operational: how to design collaboration that delivers.

1. Clarify the strategic purpose

Alliance-building should begin with disciplined scoping. Before committing to a network, leadership teams should define:

• the constraint to be addressed
• the capability to be strengthened
• the time frame for measurable progress.

If the objective is unclear, partnerships default to symbolic internationalisation; “global presence” is not a capability. Worldwide reach, accelerated digital experimentation and shared sustainability performance indicators are.

Clear objectives should also guide partner selection. Different goals require different types of collaboration, from curriculum-sharing and joint research to partnerships focused on market access.

2. Build governance that matches ambition

Governance signals seriousness of intent. Alliances will quickly become operational systems where governance will be needed to help academic standards align, give credit recognition clarity and coordinate calendars, quality assurance processes and administration.

The FOME Alliance, which brings together 15 schools advancing digital learning, operates through structured exchanges of pilots (whether that be new classes, experiments or ideas) and their outcomes. Members share evidence and refine approaches collectively, and progress depends on systematic knowledge-sharing rather than sporadic updates.

In the early stages of discussing an alliance, the leadership teams of the business schools involved should determine:

• who holds decision authority
• how costs and benefits are distributed
• how performance will be reviewed
• how disagreements will be resolved.

Ambiguity at the outset becomes friction later.

3. Align internal incentives

Partnerships require significant institutional investment, including faculty time, administrative coordination, leadership support and long-term budget commitment. Yet at many business schools, international collaboration is still treated as an additional activity rather than a core part of academic and institutional performance. As a result, partnership work often depends on a small number of highly motivated individuals, making initiatives difficult to scale and vulnerable if those individuals leave.

To build sustainable partnerships, schools need to integrate collaboration into internal incentive structures and workload-planning. This means formally recognising activities such as joint teaching, shared curriculum design, co-authored research, exchange development and leadership roles within international networks. When partnership activity is visible within promotion criteria, performance reviews and resource-allocation decisions, faculty and staff are far more likely to prioritise and engage with it consistently.

Without this internal alignment, even strategically valuable partnerships can struggle to move beyond symbolic agreements into meaningful long-term collaboration.

4. Define outputs and assess capability gains

Any collaboration should have identifiable outcomes within a defined period. These might include shared methodologies, joint programmes, common standards or co-developed research agendas. Outputs indicate whether collaboration strengthens institutional capacity.

For example, the AERO network, an alliance of European business schools focused on decarbonisation, is developing a common methodology for measuring and reducing institutional emissions. Shared standards create comparability, which in turn accelerates progress.

Weighing flexibility against fixed expansion

In the search for growth, many business schools continue to expand their physical presence abroad. While this can make sense in some cases, it also adds to an already crowded landscape and brings with it high fixed costs and exposure to unpredictable local risks. Collaboration, by contrast, allows schools to internationalise, innovate and scale without locking themselves into heavy capital or infrastructure commitments. It is a strategic response that matches the volatility of our environment. The future of business education will be shaped by the schools that go the furthest together, not alone.

Marion Debruyne is dean of Vlerick Business School, Belgium.