Every week, a business school professor, an expert in his or her field, defines key terms on the Financial Times Lexicon, our online economics, business and financial glossary.
David Schmittlein has been the dean of MIT Sloan School of Management since 2007. He is pleased to share his definition of “action learning” and how it contributes to principled, innovative and resilient leadership.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Practicing professionals are rarely presented with problems as neat and clean as those in the classroom. Real-world problems are often incompletely understood, vaguely specified, and connected to a variety of other issues in ways that only become apparent when one tries to solve the problem. Or to put it differently, the tools of the classroom are not sufficient to solve complex real-life problems.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Mens et Manus – mind and hand is the motto for MIT Sloan School of Management and something that is taken particularly seriously at the schools’ Global Entrepreneurship Lab.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

For years, MIT’s Sloan School of Management offered no degree to rival the master of finance programs at Princeton, Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon. That changed in 2008, when the university made finance its first new one-year master’s program in more than 25 years.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

MIT’s Sloan School of Management is launching a capstone course for its Executive MBA programme that involves on-site, experiential learning at an overseas company, a class that school officials say is an attempt to redefine the standard “business school junket”.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

The Master of Business Administration (MBA) candidates from Tsinghua University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented the tables and graphics that they had spent weeks designing to senior consultants and clients at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Following a five-week seminar course on the business of water, a delegation of twenty-five MIT Sloan MBA students visited Metito’s global headquarters to bridge the gap between theory and business practice within the water industry both in Turkey and the UAE.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Esra Unluaslan, Livia Lisker, Noam Bernstein, and Damien Peters, students of MIT Sloan School of Management, were in India recently through the annual India Laboratory at MIT Sloan.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Shari Loessberg, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan who works with start-ups in emerging markets through the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Laboratory, talks about this year’s student-driven projects in Malaysia and throughout the world in this podcast.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

MBA students from MIT Sloan School of Management, one of the ten most important educational institutions in the world, went to the valley of Chao in the south of Trujillo, to analyze the business model developed by Fairtrasa and about 1,000 farmers in the area.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

The first contact that Kimberlit had with the Global Entrepreneurship Laboratory from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or G-Lab, was by Endeavor, an international nonprofit that encourages the creation of new businesses.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Global Entrepreneurship Lab (G-Lab) was launched by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1990s. Providing groups of management, engineering and science students to meet business needs and gain experience on different business models, G-Lab is being led by Endeavor in Turkey this year.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Government supports the growth of the private sector as one of the key pillars that promotes social economic development, Clare Akamanzi, the Chief Operations Officer at Rwanda Development Board (RDB) told Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

A group of former and current business owners have begun new careers as social entrepreneurs, launching the Foundation for Puerto Rico, whose mission is to reposition Puerto Rico’s economy for success and sustainability through collaboration.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

In January 2012, a team of graduate students from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management’s Global Entrepreneurship Lab (MIT Sloan G-Lab) worked with PrimaVista to study the payment industry in Indonesia.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

It is more than three years since Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, found that students retained significantly more from a downloaded podcast of a lecture than those who attended the lecture in person.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Since 1989, the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition has helped start 160 companies, 52 of which collectively raised $1.3 billion in venture funding. Larger enterprises including Oracle and Merck acquired 30 of those.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Twenty-three years ago, MIT wanted to find the very best start-up ideas out there. What new companies were waiting to be born? What inventions could change our lives? Today, companies created through MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition have created businesses worth $16 billion and generated nearly 5,000 new jobs.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

For MIT Sloan School of Management MBAs, it’s time to job-hunt, network and swap business cards. The beginning of January marks the Institute’s annual “Tech Trek” tradition, where more than 150 students set out to visit companies in Boston, Seattle and Silicon Valley. But although they’ll be connected to their smartphones, they won’t be reaching for Facebook or swapping hellos on LinkedIn.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Michael Smouha is one of 30 students from MIT Sloan meeting with officials at firms like Intel, Google, LinkedIn and Facebook, among others. MIT Sloan is a top talent pool for many of these companies, which find the students’ work ethics and humility appealing.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

MIT Sloan MBA students tested the employment waters in Silicon Valley while embarking on their annual job-hunting, network-building “Tech Trek.” And companies like Intuitive Surgical, a global leader in robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery, are gaining the attention of grad students with their innovation, risk-taking, and successful track records.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

Although I’m a tech geek, I haven’t actually worked for a tech company yet. My background is in finance, so I figured MIT Sloan’s recent Technology Trek to Seattle might be a good way for me to see how—and where—I might fit into the tech world.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

What was a geeky doctor like me doing on an MIT Sloan entrepreneurship and innovation trek in Silicon Valley back in March? That was the big question, given that I’m 37 years old, trained as an anesthesiologist, and only started using a Twitter account a couple of weeks ago. Going on that tour was almost like being Alice in Wonderland—I was so out of place from the world I’ve lived in for the last decade.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

A fully furnished one-bedroom apartment in midtown Manhattan is available for rent for the week between Christmas and the New Year. It’s within walking distance of Times Square, stocked with a washer and dryer, and costs $200 a day—less than half the nightly rate at most hotels in that part of the city. You wouldn’t know about it unless you attend or have attended one of a few dozen universities.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.

I’m sitting on my couch, struggling to focus on how to begin writing. But, I can’t pick among any of the what-am-I-doing-here moments I’ve had recently to start with. To be blunt, my life lately has been crazytown. Meeting with one of Pinterest’s co-founders. Shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Playing with robots at Intuitive Surgical. Touring Sequoia Capital’s office. Listening to Polyvore’s CEO.

Please email Jennifer Grady at jgrady@mit.edu for the full article.