ASEAN Lab students help ASB revamp executive education and MBA programs

In April 2015, MIT Sloan announced its collaboration with Bank Negara Malaysia, the nation’s central bank, to establish the Asia School of Business (ASB) in Kuala Lumpur, seeking to develop the next generation of leaders in the rapidly growing Southeast Asian (ASEAN) region.

ASB recently launched a full-time, 12-month MBA program developed in close collaboration with MIT Sloan. Naturally, when MIT Sloan and ASB wanted to take their educational synergies up a notch, they welcomed the perspectives of MIT Sloan students. 

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Two ASEAN Lab teams from MIT Sloan traveled to Malaysia to tackle two projects: educational synergies and branding. The on-the-ground international work experience, particularly in ASEAN, was an enormous draw for students eager to go beyond case studies.

“ASEAN Lab is a really unique experience. In Action Learning, MIT students actually get the chance to go to the region and work alongside a host organization on an identified project and provide recommendations; it really feels like you are part of the local team. The beauty of Action Learning is you get to use what you learned in the core courses and in the electives you choose as a student, and apply those skills in an environment where it’s really safe to ask questions about things you’re curious about or to test out a recommendation and see if it works or not,” says Sophia Mullineaux, MBA ’24. 

As an Action Learning course, ASEAN Lab’s pedagogy of classroom lectures, case studies and guest speakers provide regional context, and the project component allows students to work in teams of four in an intensive experiential learning opportunity," says Luis Barros, a lecturer at MIT Sloan. “The students are to work collaboratively with the senior leadership to solve complex management challenges and to analyze the decisions and performance facing companies operating in Southeast Asia - in this case, Asia School of Business (ASB). The project also afforded the students the opportunity to utilize their skills in integrated problem solving in order to assist key strategies of ASB.”

Project 1: Helping executive education program stand out from the competition

The ASEAN Lab team focused on executive education analyzed 35 programs in and around the ASEAN region to better understand the competitiveness of ASB’s programs in their respective markets. They also consulted on a digital roadmap for the executive education program.

The team recommended focusing on modular learning, where students attend classes for a few weeks at a time, receive a certificate, and build step-by-step to a degree. They arrived at that recommendation by offering valuable competitive benchmarking against other regional schools in terms of cost, research, faculty, and more.

“ASB had been focused on: ‘We need to drive revenue; we need to get executives in the classroom and elevate our brand,’” says Mullineaux. “We were able to broaden that for them a bit to say: ‘Here’s the landscape, here’s who you’re competing against, and here’s what you’re doing similarly or differently.’ Within that competitive set, we helped ASB by offering additional revenue creation opportunities in terms of how much their competitors were charging for similar programs.” 

The team also created a framework of key skills students and employers wanted from executive education, with an emphasis on differentiating ASB from peer schools.

“We found qualities that could continue to separate ASB from the competition, like the ability to create custom programs for different employers, allowing executives the opportunity to do action learning like we were doing as students, or creating programming for entrepreneurial support,” Mullineaux says. 

Indeed, entrepreneurship was a key angle: “We found through our extensive research that, regardless of the country, there’s a huge entrepreneurial spirit in ASEAN, and the skills required to be a successful entrepreneur are competencies that can be taught in the classroom,” she notes.

Lastly, the team focused on branding, coupled with digital initiatives. 

“One of our recommendations was the opportunity to deliver programming in a hybrid fashion, and not requiring busy executives to always be in person at the Kuala Lumpur campus. You can reach more executives outside of Malaysia, who are in a similar time zone, that way,” Mullineaux says. 

Project 2: Attracting MBA students and streamlining internal workflows 

The second team focused on ASB’s MBA student journey. ASB recently switched from a two-year to a one-year program, and the team needed to refine the ideal student profile to reflect Southeast Asia’s workforce, which leans toward family businesses, government-linked companies, and startups. 

Their job was twofold: They analyzed ways for ASB to be more aggressive in targeting and marketing to appropriate potential students, and they also helped to rethink the program’s internal collaboration structures to streamline work. Currently, four separate offices—Action Learning, Alumni Relations, Career Development, and Admissions — interact with students, creating parallel workstreams that could be consolidated for better load distribution.

“There was so much good work being done and so much emotional investment that these incredible individuals were putting in to create a brand-new program, essentially, for students and to make sure that they have a positive experience,” says Nisha Patel, MBA ’25. “We sat down with all of them and tried to understand where the workloads were, whether there were opportunities for even incremental improvements in collaboration, and to look for process flow efficiencies to improve the student journey.”

Patel says this cross-collaboration allowed for significant interaction with many ASB stakeholders, offering lots of visibility for MIT Sloan students.

Nisha Patel | MBA '25

It was exciting and fulfilling to be able to form such wonderful relationships with teams across the student journey offices, and not just our main project host. We had wonderful interviews with so many students while they were on campus to better understand their experience.

An immersive, hands-on learning experience

Both teams relished the hands-on, in-person learning opportunity, especially students who’d never traveled to the ASEAN region before. While on ASB’s campus, teams enjoyed ongoing access to their project hosts, faculty stakeholders, and students, facilitated by Action Learning faculty.

“We had access to so many different program offices. We were so welcomed: The hospitality was far beyond our expectations. It really added so much richness to the actual learning journey in general, but also made all of us across both teams much more motivated to try to give back because we were having such a wonderful experience on the ground. There was a really wide breadth of engagement,” Patel says.

The students appreciated how the ASB leadership and MIT faculty prepared them for the cultural expectations in Malaysia, particularly since they were traveling during Ramadan. 

They were “willing to meet with both teams to give us the lay of the land on what to expect in Malaysia, [giving] us recommendations on visiting a primarily Muslim country during the holy month, which was really helpful,” Mullineaux says.

Overall, both teams said that Action Learning offered exactly what was promised: hands-on learning and action, in an immersive environment.

“It’s been incredibly enriching. It’s really hard to replicate that kind of experience if you aren’t working on the ground or aren’t really diving into the country’s history as we did,” says Patel. “Personally, I’m so eager to go back to Kuala Lumpur one day. In fact, one of our team members interested in sustainability did return to help out in ASB’s highly regarded Kuala Lumpur International Sustainability Conference held on June 7, 2024. I can’t speak highly enough about how positive an experience our sojourn in Kuala Lumpur was, and how incredibly grateful I am for the generosity and hospitality of our host organization.” 

“We truly got to generate and work on ideas that helped to advance the ability of other individuals, whether that be in the educational journey of an MBA student or in the continuing education of a corporate employee, to learn more about management, and how to become a better business leader,” says Mullineaux. “When you couple that with MIT’s motto, “mens et manus” (mind and hand), that’s exactly what we got to do in Action Learning. That’s the big thing I would want readers to take away: There’s no greater way to live out the motto, the values, and the mission of MIT Sloan than Action Learning.”