Yuji Ijiri is the Robert M. Trueblood University Professor of Accounting and Economics at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. He has a broad set of interests in the social sciences, with major publications in the fields of accounting, economics, management, mathematics, statistics, and computers. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 1963, and has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon for 36 years. |
Chapter 7, selection: Science, Technology,
and the Innovative Business School The start of the new millennium offers an opportunity to take a super-long-term perspective by using a thousand years as a unit of measurement instead of the normal one year, ten years, or a hundred years. This reminded me of a delightful 1978 film and its follow-up 1982 book called, Powers of Ten, by Charles Eames et al. in which an image of Earth and its surroundings was enlarged by a power of ten in 41 steps by decrementing the power of the scale from 1025 to 10-16. This made me feel less fearful about extremely large or extremely small objects. The new millennium seems to give me the same feeling
about time. The "millennium perspective" may not necessarily
assure any better insight into the distant future but it certainly offers
a chance to look back thousands of years and view contemporary issues
from this super-long-term historical perspective. The same contemporary
issues may look quite different depending upon which power of ten is chosen
as the unit of the time scale. For this reason, I was delighted to receive an invitation
to write this essay on "The Innovative Business School." I wish
to thank the editors as well as Doug Dunn, then Dean of the Graduate School
of Industrial Administration, for this opportunity, and their help during
the writing. I decided to choose as the basic theme of the essay the
recent explosive development in science and technology and its impact
on business and business education. During my three and a half decades
on the Carnegie Mellon faculty, I have been very much interested in and
frequently astonished by discoveries and breakthroughs in science, technology,
and mathematics. |
Innovative University Home | Foreword | Table of Contents | Authors | Buy the Book
Carnegie Mellon Home | Carnegie Mellon Site Index
Last updated 01 November 2004.