KANSAS CITY—Several years ago, Dean Teng-kee Tan of the University of Missouri-Kansas City's business school envisioned a new building that would help students collaborate on problem-solving. And on Monday, GlobeSt.com reported that the $32 million, 58,000-square-foot Henry W. Bloch Executive Hall for Entrepreneurship and Innovation will open this fall. “'We don't solve problems sitting in a room by ourselves,'” Tan is fond of saying, according to Casey Cassias, a principal of BNIM, the Kansas City-based designer that won the competition to design the new three-story building. Cassias spoke with GlobeSt.com on how they approached this project.

“The path of innovation is never linear,” is another of Tan's beliefs, Cassius says, and the designers took it to heart. Although the finished building will look square-shaped to outside observers, inside students will move through curved spaces that circle a central atrium. “The goal was to create collaborative space, unlike many other business schools, where students are set off into silos or off in corners.” Instead of traditional lecture set-ups, students and teachers will interact in group settings. Each student team will also have their own flat-screens and computers so then can communicate with colleagues at Stanford, MIT and even China as they pursue projects. “It will be a dynamic working environment with more problem-solving as a group.”

Tan has also said he wants “to break traditional molds by inventing and propagating new methods of experiential learning.” Therefore, the school will have a behavioral lab where students will conduct experiments to gain insights into consumer behavior and a trading floor, allowing the simulation of real-time market transactions.

“I don't think there have been any other business schools doing things quite like this,” adds Cassias. Essentially, students and teachers will work together in a setting more like a lab than a business office. The larger aspiration was to help the Bloch school compete with the Ivy League. “If you look at the rankings,” he says, “Bloch is in competition with Stanford and MIT; that is their peer group.” From the moment two years ago when they won the design competition, BNIM knew this “wasn't just another business school in the Midwest; it was a business school meant to compete with all others in the US and even across the world.”

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Designing the Business School of the Future

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