‘Designer Mindset’: Innovating Babson’s New DBA Program

For the first time in its history, Babson will welcome doctoral students to campus this fall. The new Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) program has been years in the making and is led by faculty director and Professor of Innovation & Design Sebastian Fixson. 

“With this innovation, Babson will train practitioner-scholars and take a strategic leadership role in producing practice-relevant research,” Fixson says. 

Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, Fixson brings his multidisciplinary background to leading this program. A mechanical engineer by training with experience consulting on manufacturing projects, Fixson came to Boston to earn his PhD at MIT and taught industrial engineering at the University of Michigan. His early research focused on product development of complex technical products such as automobiles. 

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“Over time, I realized that what I studied was people innovating,” Fixson says. “Most of the conversations I joined, the journals I read, the conferences I went to were populated by people at business schools.”  

This led him in 2008 to a faculty position at Babson in the Operations and Information Management Division. He soon embarked on several administrative roles on campus, including faculty director of the Master of Science in Management in Entrepreneurial Leadership degree program, chair of the division, and associate dean of graduate programs and innovation. The DBA launch has been one of his top priorities and an intense, multiyear effort. 

“The engineer and designer in me was looking for the chance to create something new. … It’s inspiring to launch the program in the world and see its impact.”
Professor Sebastian Fixson, faculty director of the DBA program

Members of the Babson faculty had considered a doctoral degree for many years, Fixson says. He began to revisit the possibility of offering a DBA in 2022, in part because demand for these programs had grown significantly. Unlike a PhD, which teaches students research methods and disciplinary content for the purpose of generating new theory, the DBA is practice oriented and interdisciplinary. DBA students develop research skills to address concrete business and management problems, Fixson says. 

He and colleagues used a “designer mindset” to develop the DBA program. For example, they interviewed 15 DBA graduates from other schools to deeply understand who seeks a DBA and what they drew from their programs. Insights from those conversations helped them shape a Babson-specific DBA.

Fixson aims for Babson’s DBA graduates to apply their new research expertise to make real-world impact through evidence-based management. He gives the example of a DBA graduate from another institution who used his doctoral studies to convince the board of directors of his organization to allow him to create a $50 million innovation fund. Fixson looks forward to similar contributions from Babson DBAs.  

He says the DBA project has been a welcome complement to the management challenge of leading the graduate school through the pandemic. “The engineer and designer in me was looking for the chance to create something new,” Fixson says. “This has been a huge team effort involving lots of people. It’s inspiring to launch the program in the world and see its impact.”

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