You are Marta Bonet, Dean of IMD-Barcelona, a private business school on Avinguda Diagonal. A venture-funded platform has signed 14,000 mid-career learners in eighteen months at a fifth of your price, and none of them ever applied to your school. The board has ring-fenced €4.5 million and wants to know how IMD will answer.
The situation
IMD-Barcelona teaches 1,900 students a year across a full-time MBA, an executive MBA, six specialised masters and a growing menu of open programmes for executives. It has 95 core faculty, takes in €34 million and clears an operating surplus of €2.72 million, 8%. It is still working towards the sector's most recognised accreditations, and 62% of its revenue comes from the degree masters.
Those masters are shrinking: applications fell from 2,250 to 2,000 in two years, 11%, and yield, the share of admitted applicants who enrol, slipped from 41% to 36%. Meanwhile SkillForge, a micro-credential platform, has signed 14,000 mid-career learners in eighteen months at about a fifth of IMD's price, and is now courting two of the school's largest corporate clients. Its offer is narrower than a degree and far cheaper.
At the spring board meeting on 9 March 2026, the foundation ring-fenced €4.5 million to build something that wins part of that market back, open for enrolment in autumn 2027: about 60% of the €7.2 million a full launch would need. The chair warned that a second weak year would trigger a review of who runs the school. You have been dean for a little over a year, after two decades building corporate relationships as director of the executive MBA.