Companies are spending more of their training budgets in-house and setting up their own “corporate universities”, rather than relying on business schools and consulting firms. Their main goal is to build a curriculum tailored to the company’s strategy.
General Electric opened the first corporate university in 1956. The number of corporate universities in America doubled between 1997 and 2007, to around 2,000. According to the Economist, more than 4,000 companies around the world have them, including big brands such as Unilever, ArcelorMittal, Tenaris (on edX) and Apple –who has hired Yale’s business school’s dean.
