Columbia Prof. Sameer Maskey talks about joint MBA+CS class  and why Computer Science is increasingly becoming more important for MBA students and vice versa.

Last year, I started designing a course that would bring MBA students and Computer Science students in the same classroom. Over the course of teaching Computer Science classes for a few years while simultaneously observing my friends who were running various startups, I was able to discern a considerable chasm between people from the two disciplines. The disconnect between Computer Science and Business students in today’s landscape, especially when the boundaries between the two fields are becoming increasingly blurred, causes far reaching consequences for the new generation of entrepreneurs. Many Computer Science (CS) students graduate without ever setting foot in Business School while most MBA students have never taken a Computer Science class. CS students are more comfortable with the concepts of loss functions, conditional independence and node.js than concepts of customer needs, value propositions, and branding. On the other hand, MBA students know a lot about finance, management and accounting, but not a lot about technology. A traditional career path in business or technology is conducive to this sort of siloed expertise. However, if a student is planning to build a technology startup, then stepping outside their comfort zone and talking to people from other departments becomes imperative.

Read more 

http://www.sameermaskey.com/2013/04/bridging-the-gap-columbia-mba-and-cs-students-take-the-same-course/