Condensed and edited from a lecture given by the former dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. The speech was the last of the Chaplin-Tyler Lecture Series given earlier this year at the University of Delaware.

The future of business education is going to be better than what it is today because people need more management education. And management education is going to become more important than what it is today. But the new demand is not going to come from MBA students─it will come from other disciplines. My belief is that business schools in the future will become the central hub of the universities.

If you look at the life sciences department of Johns Hopkins University, they get doctoral students in the hundreds every year in the life sciences. Now, these students are not all going to become professors. Some of them would like to go and become entrepreneurs or go and work for a venture capital firm that invest in biotech companies. They will come to the business schools─or business schools can start creating some kind of certificate courses [for them] if they're not interested in a full-time MBA program.

Our future is very good, but we cannot do business as usual. We also have to ask ourselves this question: What's our purpose?

First is knowledge creation. Knowledge creation means research. The second is knowledge dissemination. And the third is knowledge certification. The McKinseys of the world can start training executives; they can start training programs. But they cannot award an MBA degree or a BA degree. So knowledge certification is also a very important part of what we do.

Now, think of the last 500 years. If you look at the 16th, 17th, 18th, and the 19th centuries, the key emphasis in those years was on colonization. Countries captured other countries; that's how countries did business. Then in the 20th century, we moved from colonization to what I call capitalism, or open market competition. In that period, the emphasis was on competition. And the new powers after the Second World War were, of course, the US, Japan, and Europe.

Now, where we are is the century of human capital development. And if human capital is going to be the key resource, business schools are really meant for that purpose, because we are in the business of attracting and shaping talent. We add value to them, teach them different tools, concepts, and we prepare them for the challenging world.