Professor Eric Cornuel, President of EFMD Global, talked to Sasin Insights about cultivating thought leadership roles in business schools. Business schools are becoming more dynamic, agile, versatile, and adaptative, but Professor Eric stated that business schools should create research that is more connected with the world’s reality. “The disconnection [in research] that has been going on for 40 to 50 years is detrimental to the image of business schools,” he said. “We must reorient research on more heuristics dimensions. It’s great to do extremely academic research, but we shouldn’t forget that we have an important mission to deliver research that is useful for the development of societies, for the management of organizations, and make us aware of the coming challenges,” he added. With business schools embracing technological evolution, Professor Eric observed that business schools are moving from a castle approach to a network approach. Business schools are opening up the walls in the universities and using research not for its own sake but for education. Talking about sustainability in education, he believes combining the two approaches of online learning and classroom learning will result in better productivity and a higher- level of community. “If we want to protect the planet, if we want to pollute less, displacing people all the time is not necessarily good so we can insist on more blended learning, more distributed learning with people learning in homes, companies,” he said, “And then coming for periods of concentration where professors would convey more qualitative, refined knowledge with debate and participation among students, so we can reach a level of education higher than what we did in the past.”