Course overview

The Central Saint Martins Birkbeck MBA places creative practice and social engagement at the heart of future leadership. Through an approach combining critical and analytical thinking, the course challenges existing business practice through creative and innovative approaches to effect positive change in a complex world. The ambition of this joint degree is to develop agile and resilient leaders who engage constructively, creatively and confidently with the uncertain to transform systems, cultures and communities.

The MBA curriculum is driven by a desire to generate new values and impact, producing transformational leaders and change-makers with a humanity-centred, social purpose to address social, cultural, environmental and economic problems, and effect positive change.

Focusing on the importance of identifying and understanding problem contexts and scenarios, live projects are integrated as part of the holistic experience to explore and challenge the core MBA disciplines of leadership, strategy, finance, entrepreneurship, operations and marketing.

The MBA introduces art and design school thinking to business contexts through experiential and reflective learning, innovation practice, and the building of criticality from thinking-through-doing, a core strength of the art school.

The converging crises of global pandemic, climate emergency and social inequality have proven the fragility and limitations of conventional economic models. The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2020 forecasts the top 10 skills for 2025 to include analytical thinking and innovation, active learning and learning strategies, complex problem solving, critical thinking and analysis, creativity, originality and initiative, and reasoning, problem solving and ideation, skills embedded within this forward-looking MBA.?

A collaboration between Central Saint Martins, one of the world’s leading art schools, and Birkbeck, a top ranked research-intensive institution, this joint degree is unique in equipping students to step outside of existing silos to develop a culture of creative practice combining art and business school thinking. The course supports community engagement, interdisciplinary knowledge, and industry networks to create a valuable difference for business, people and planet.

We are committed to developing ethical business administration practices. To achieve this, we are working to embed UAL's Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice into the course.