{"id":294426,"date":"2021-07-09T00:18:20","date_gmt":"2021-07-08T21:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/how-business-schools-are-dealing-with-the-rise-in-cryptocurrency\/"},"modified":"2021-07-09T00:18:20","modified_gmt":"2021-07-08T21:18:20","slug":"how-business-schools-are-dealing-with-the-rise-in-cryptocurrency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-business-schools-are-dealing-with-the-rise-in-cryptocurrency\/","title":{"rendered":"#How business schools are dealing with the rise in cryptocurrency"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#How business schools are dealing with the rise in cryptocurrency<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Cryptocurrency courses have become a big deal in a short amount of time\u2014much like cryptocurrencies themselves. As recently as three years ago, it still seemed disreputable for business schools to teach about Bitcoin or other electronic currencies that are secured through online databases. \u201cAt the very beginning, there was a misconception that cryptos were funny money and a speculative tool,\u201d says Henry Kim, associate professor at the Schulich School of Business, York University, and director and co-founder of the school\u2019s blockchain.lab. \u201cBusiness schools didn\u2019t want to teach that because they thought it was faddish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andreas Park, an associate professor of finance at the University of Toronto, agrees. \u201cFor the longest time there was great skepticism among my colleagues,\u201d says Park, who will soon be starting a course on decentralized finance and cryptocurrency in the Rotman School of Management\u2019s MBA program. Today, it\u2019s more common to hear cryptocurrency described as something that is becoming an inescapable part of business education. That\u2019s especially true of blockchain technology<\/a>, the vast, decentralized databases that cryptocurrencies rely on to verify and process new transactions with a minimum of human involvement. \u201cBlockchain has become part of elective business education over the past five years,\u201d says Jean-Philippe Vergne, the former director of the Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab at Ivey Business School in London, Ont. \u201cOver the next five, it will likely become part of core business education, just like database management is integrated into core business undergrad and graduate modules in information systems management.\u201d<\/p>\n

Katya Malinova is an associate professor at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, where she teaches a course called \u201cIntroduction to FinTech\u201d (financial technology). She says the status of these technologies seemed to reach a turning point in 2017, when there was a boom in cryptocurrency investment, with investors throwing money at cryptocurrency tokens (the equivalent of shares in a more conventional company) and companies like Bitcoin and its younger competitor Ethereum. Not all of these investments were wise, \u201cbut the idea of digitizing assets and putting them on the blockchain stuck,\u201d Malinova says. And that raises questions about whether traditional financial technologies can be replaced by new ones. Even though the many worthless tokens of 2017 are sometimes referred to as a cautionary tale, that outpouring of investment made cryptocurrency impossible to ignore. By the fall of 2018, \u201cit was fairly clear that FinTech and\/or blockchain should be discussed in business schools,\u201d Malinova says.<\/p>\n

Business schools that added the subject as early as possible, before the boom of 2017, may be benefiting from being ahead of the curve, just as it paid off to be an early investor in Bitcoin. Vergne definitely thinks that\u2019s true at Ivey, which began teaching about Bitcoin in 2013 and integrating it across programs in 2014; they were listed in a Forbes<\/em> article on the relatively small number of important \u201cbitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies\u201d courses. Vergne, now an associate professor at the UCL School of Management in London, England, co-designed the \u201cBitcoin Crash Course\u201d when he was at Ivey, and says the school\u2019s head start in integrating cryptocurrencies into its programming paid off for some of its students: \u201cSeveral financial technology startups were founded in Toronto by Ivey alumni who took this kind of module,\u201d says Vergne, referring to companies such as Ledn, Lending Loop and Satstreet. \u201cThey were the trailblazers and their trajectory has been spectacular,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

It would be easy to assume that students, especially younger ones, would be pushing for knowledge on cryptocurrency to be included in business curriculums, but it\u2019s not always the case. \u201cWhen I started including it in my classes, most students hadn\u2019t even heard of Bitcoin,\u201d Park recalls. Vergne thinks students were initially reluctant to ask for courses on the subject\u2014not because they didn\u2019t know about it, but because \u201cthey simply did not believe that a school like Ivey, which can app<\/a>ear quite conservative at first, would be open to the idea. But as soon as they were presented with an opportunity to engage, interest surged, and students kept asking for more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another aspect of business education that plays a role in increasing cryptocurrency\u2019s profile is something that is one of the most important functions of MBA programs: helping graduates find work. \u201cBusiness schools are very vocational,\u201d Kim says. \u201cWe want to make sure we teach courses that are directly applicable for our students\u2019 job opportunities or provide really good complementary learning for the jobs they take.\u201d MBA programs can\u2019t downplay something that\u2019s becoming a major source of employment: \u201cClearly if there\u2019s $2 trillion worth of investments in it, there\u2019s probably some job opportunities there,\u201d Kim adds.<\/p>\n

The content of programs doesn\u2019t only respond to the market; it also changes to fit research. \u201cI would say that in most cases, faculty expertise is behind the introduction of new courses,\u201d Malinova says. Don Cyr, professor of finance at Brock University\u2019s Goodman School of Business, says that around 2015 or 2016, there was an \u201cexplosion\u201d in the number of research studies being done on cryptocurrencies. Business schools also take some cues from professional certification programs; once the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program included some of these topics, it became what Cyr calls \u201ca very strong indicator\u201d that they also belonged in MBA programs.<\/p>\n

Even though cryptocurrency is a mostly new subject, most agree it still requires a traditional teaching approach. \u201cStudents are often very interested in the potential for investing in cryptocurrencies, and may have dabbled in it,\u201d Cyr says, but they are \u201coften unaware of the broader implications of blockchain or digital ledger technology in general<\/a> in the finance field.\u201d Asked if anything important has changed in the principles she teaches, Malinova says there is \u201cnothing fundamentally new in my opinion.\u201d Vergne says blockchain \u201cchanges the practice of finance in depth, but not its fundamental laws.\u201d Park just says, \u201cNo. Economics is economics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"(Illustration<\/p>\n

(Illustration by Raymond Biesinger)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

There are, however, some new things that have to be taken into account when teaching this topic. The typical way to teach about financial history is by describing how a new concept developed out of a \u201cpipeline of academic researchers and practitioners in the field of finance,\u201d Cyr says, adding that a key fact about cryptocurrency is that it developed outside that pipeline: \u201cWe don\u2019t know the identity of the developer of Bitcoin, and to some extent its adoption was fuelled by dissatisfaction with central banks and their control of the money supply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Business schools are also learning to focus not on individual currencies like Bitcoin\u2014which themselves may well turn out to be fads\u2014but the principles and technologies they\u2019re attached to, which are impossible to put back into the bottle. Park says he often has to deal with the misconception that blockchain is the same thing as Bitcoin, and that the significant thing about blockchain is that it operates \u201call value transfers on a single infrastructure,\u201d instead of splitting them up into payments, stocks, bonds and other assets we\u2019ve gotten used to.<\/p>\n

Park says a securities trade today requires the use of \u201cmany platforms and systems: your broker\u2019s internal system, stock exchanges, clearing and settlement services, beneficiary ownership record keepers, custodian banks and the payments system\u2014all separate and awkwardly linked,\u201d he says. A blockchain combines all of these things, which could potentially reduce the role of those familiar platforms and systems, and the jobs that go with them.<\/p>\n

In addition, because blockchain organizes investment and payment in such a streamlined way, without all those intermedia<\/a>ries, Vergne thinks it has the potential to shake up organization theory and how it\u2019s taught. \u201cIt changes what we know about the role of managerial hierarchies and centralized coordination in the growth of business organizations,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is where most of the exciting research is happening these days.\u201d<\/p>\n

That means we\u2019re only seeing the beginning of the types of courses and teaching approaches that crypto and blockchain will inspire. Kim points to the University of Nicosia in Cyprus, which has \u201ca complete master\u2019s program in blockchain.\u201d Closer to home, he notes, York University offers blockchain education through its School of Continuing Studies. Future classes will have the benefit of very informed, even experienced students, says Kim: \u201cMost high schools in Toronto have a blockchain\/Ethereum club. Eventually, we will see these folks in the MBA programs.\u201d<\/p>\n

As students come in more informed about the subject, faculty will need to figure out how to help them think about it in a transformative way; Malinova likes to point out that blockchain could help to reach the billions of people \u201cwho have no access to financial services through no fault of their own,\u201d and she thinks there shouldn\u2019t be too much focus on the potential negatives. \u201cYes, there are bad apples, scammers and the like, and they need to go, obviously,\u201d she says. \u201cBut the important issue is how much good this new world can do. For what it\u2019s worth, after taking my class, the students get it.\u201d Park says that in order to make sure they\u2019re providing a long-lasting education, business schools need to be \u201cforward-looking, and inform students about the broad changes that blockchain technology can bring.\u201d If cryptocurrency ends up changing the world, it will be partly because of the students and researchers who were convinced that it could.<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the August 2021 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cNew kid on the blockchain.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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