MBA Program Overview

Looking ahead amid uncertainty, setting goals based on a clear vision, and making strategic decisions by identifying what is the most important among numerous pieces of information - business leaders are required to have sophisticated capabilities to analyze information and make judgment. They also need to have a sense of mission, enthusiasm, and leadership to guide society and their respective organizations based on their own analysis and judgment. Our world-class management education and an overwhelming volume of learning at KBS enable students to acquire such multifaceted leadership qualities. During the first year, students take eight core courses covering eight major areas of business management and gain knowledge on these areas through heuristic case method approach. This knowledge serves as the foundation for required management skills. At the same time, they learn how to utilize this knowledge organically and in an interdisciplinary way through the mandatory Business Game course. The second year is designed to deepen students' capabilities in their respective areas of specialization, turning these capabilities into their strengths in the practice of management. They take a set of specialized courses according to their own career plans and refine their abilities to identify and solve problems in small-group seminars. KBS also offers various international programs that help students develop international business sense.

KBS develops leaders of character proficient in their respective areas of specialty and core management skills.

KBS was established in 1962 as Japan's first full-fledged business school. In 1978, our one-year program, which was introduced in 1969, was dissolved and evolved into the country's first two-year MBA program. Since then, remaining loyal to the spirit of "practical learning" embraced in the founding philosophy of Keio University, we have been working to develop business leaders matched to the needs of the times on the basis of practical education using the case method. We also started providing a Ph.D. program in 1991 for the purpose of developing professional researchers specialized in business management.

Our MBA program is full-time schooling program, requiring students to attend class sessions basically on campus on weekdays.

Across industries, increasingly complex, global, and advanced economic activities have served to necessitate more specialized managerial functions and refined administrative techniques in various functional areas of business administration, including production, sales, finance, and personnel affairs. With the trend moving toward increasing sophistication and specialization, leaders are now required to have highly-developed skills to fuse and coordinate activities of these professionals in order to accomplish the goal of their respective organizations.

Additionally, technological advancements, including those in the field of information technology, have brought new possibilities for economic activities, while changing people's lifestyles and triggering a shift in their needs that the said economic activities must satisfy. Our individual economic activities must also pay even greater attention to the effects we may cause on macro-economic issues, such as growing environmental problems and resource constraint issues.

Our MBA program aims to develop excellent and innovative leaders equipped with abilities to accurately foresee a range of changes, fuse and coordinate activities of highly-skilled professionals, and forge ahead and accomplish truly valuable organizational objectives in the modern economic environment in which people interact more closely and globally.