LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- The business school and the degree it awards -- masters in business administration -- are an American invention. Europe began establishing business schools in the early postwar decades, in good part in response to what was termed "le defi Americain" (after a best-selling book of the same title by French journalist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber), as did other parts of the world. Outside the United States, however, business schools were somewhat peripheral for several decades, and they did not exist at all in the Soviet bloc.
In the 1990s, globalization -- the opening and interdependence of world markets -- and the information revolution transformed the business landscape. Prior to globalization, business management was a reasonably predictable and prosaic undertaking. This was primarily due to high costs of transportation and communication and the protectionism that prevailed, to greater or lesser degree, in all markets. Business education primarily consisted of teaching participants basic management tools.