Yale School of Management is experimenting with a radically new MBA curriculum that hopes to change the way students think about business. Instead of taking traditional courses in finance, marketing or accounting, Yale MBA students will be taking multidisciplinary courses that cut across functional boundaries. For example, there are first-year courses called The Innovator, The Competitor and The Customer. Anyway, here are the details of the new MBA curriculum from Yale:

“The goal of the new curriculum is to provide management education in a richer, more relevant context. Yale’s new approach aligns the way management is taught with the way managers operate every day and challenges students to shape their career goals around their personal values and aspirations.

“The management profession has experienced profound change in the past few decades, but management education has not,” says Joel M. Podolny, dean of the Yale School of Management. “Most business school curricula are based on a model that made sense in the past. But today, a successful manager must be able to identify and frame business problems and move across a variety of organizational, political and geographic boundaries to solve those problems. Our new curriculum teaches the integrated skills contemporary managers need.”

“No executive wakes up in the morning and thinks, ‘I’m going to do finance today,’ so it doesn’t make sense for students to sit in a finance class and learn to crunch numbers absent of any context,” says Sharon Oster, the Frederick D. Wolfe Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship, who is one of a number of senior faculty who worked on developing the new curriculum and led the design of the “Competitor” course. “We are teaching them in a way that’s relevant in the real world.”