Paradigm of Managerial Education for a Technological Breakthrough in the Economy

The article presents the results of the authors’ research into ways of improving managerial education and organization of anticipatory learning that are required for achieving a technological breakthrough in the national economy. The authors prove that in order to address complex tasks associated with modernization and emergence of Industry 4.0, to make decisions under uncertainty, unpredictable changes and considerable risk, managers need to possess interdisciplinary competencies in engineering and economics and pre-emptive action. The authors’ hypothesis that calls for change in managerial education is based on the idea that the new generation of managers will engage in the complex processes of creating fundamentally new technologies and markets as well as of modernizing the existing industries. To verify the hypothesis, we performed an analysis of development trends in global managerial education and universities’ responses to new challenges. The analysis allowed identifying the key characteristics of educational models employed by leading universities. They are focus on breakthrough technologies as well as on design and research component, orientation to cross-disciplinary educational products. The results of the analysis and surveys of experts have enabled the authors to determine the content of relevant interdisciplinary competencies for a technological breakthrough and to formulate the principles of anticipatory learning. These principles are represented in the organized process of creating knowledge and competences for addressing future problems corresponding to global trends and national development programs. The article describes the experience of the Research and Educational Centre for Interdisciplinary Investigations and Educational Programs (REC ENGEC) at the Ural Federal University in implementing a new paradigm of managerial education. It was designed within the framework of the research field «Pre-emptive management in rapidly developing industries» and the multi-project «New leaders for technological breakthrough». Overall, the results are of interest to the universities, including corporate ones, as well as to innovative business structures and research institutes participating in the process of transformation of educational models to response the new challenges of the technological revolution.