Much before Professor Nitin Nohria takes over as the tenth dean of the hallowed Harvard Business School on July 1, he will be hosting a conference on imagining the future of leadership with his colleagues Rakesh Khurana and Scott Snook. The Harvard Business Review blog is, in fact, abuzz in the run-up to the meet which will probably have some critical takeaways for Nohria himself, as he is taking over in a leadership in action role at a time when business education is at an inflection point.

The way forward for him and for HBS would be a sharper focus on innovation around the world and ideas that are developed by companies faced with real problems. “We are chasing knowledge and ideas around the world—in India, Brazil, China, Europe and also in America,” says Nohria.

Like him, the entire community of business education providers in the US today is focused on innovation and leadership around the world, at a time when the world’s largest economy is itself emerging out of a recession. “The lessons from the last eighteen months have been about rethinking the business education curriculum. Going forward, our focus will be on creating leadership and tapping into ideas around the world,” says Yash P Gupta, dean and professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore. Gupta became the first permanent dean of Carey Business School in 2008. The B-school has looking at drawing from innovative models in companies around the world and has expanded its intellectual flexibility since he took over as dean.

“Empathy is critical for the future success of business education and so is having a worldview. At Johns Hopkins, we look at businesses in diverse geographies such as Rwanda, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Tobago & Trinidad and China to understand complex systems and societies,” says Gupta, who believes that increasingly B-schools in the US will find leaders from diverse cultural and academic background. “Nitin’s appointment as Dean of HBS is not only about his academic excellence but also because top institutions are looking for diversity in their future role models,” he says.

In fact, the future of business education, in the aftermath of the recession is an issue that leaders across the world are grappling with. Nearer home, Ajit Rangnekar, dean of the Indian School of Business at Hyderabad, says that Prof Nohria is taking charge at Harvard at a stage when people are questioning the very role of management education. “This is a great development as I am sure he will come out with very new and different ideas on how to make management education relevant in today’s world,” he says.

Prof Nohria himself is firmly committed of the HBS’ Mumbai-based India Research Center, which was established in 2006. “I was teaching in India recently and had representatives from many companies attending the classes. My colleagues Tarun Khanna and Krishna Palepu have been doing research on Indian companies and how many of them are finding innovative ways to fill in institutional voids in the Indian market, for over a decade,” he says.