Melbourne Business School (MBS) was ranked among the top 50 MBA for entrepreneurs with nearly one in five (17%) of MBA graduates starting a company while studying or in the three years following graduation.
MBA ranked 38th in the world and was the only Australian school to make the list.
“This result is tremendous recognition of our School’s success in developing the skills, knowledge and networks our students need to succeed in their post-MBA life,” Melbourne Business School Dean Zeger Degraeve said.
“This ranking result is a terrific endorsement of our world-class teaching and the strength of our global alumni community, which has more than 17,000 members in more than 95 countries.
Melbourne Business School’s ranking in the Financial Times’ 2017 ranking of the best 50 MBA programmes for entrepreneurship was a result of FT research which surveyed the MBA class of 2013 by using 12 unique criteria, including the percentage of graduates who started their own company, the proportion of full-time entrepreneurs and the level of help they received from their school and alumni network.
The research found that MBS had produced 15% female entrepreneurs, and 79% of entrepreneurial businesses that stemmed from an MBS education were still operating.
Around 36% of MBS’s MBA-qualified entrepreneurs said their independent ventures were their main source of income.
As Australia’s only representative on the list, MBS shared the rankings with 13 other countries, which the Financial Times increased from only eight in 2016.
The Unites States were a dominant force in the rankings, with Stanford Graduate School of Business placing first followed the Sloan School of Management at MIT and the Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, both in Massachusetts.
According to the Financial Times, more than a third of Stanford’s 2013 MBA alumni started a company while studying or in the three years following graduation. The school’s success was attributed to a research focus on innovation its location in the heart of Silicon Valley and the strength of its alumni network.
The rankings found that British MBA graduates were the most entrepreneurial, with 35 per cent starting their own company, just ahead of graduates from Mexico. The UK entrepreneurial scene was the most multicultural, with nearly half of British start-ups set up by foreign entrepreneurs.
Japan and South Korea produced 11% and 13% of graduates respectively who created start-ups.
