The Academy for Information & Management (AI&M) is a spin-off organization originating from the University of Amsterdam; it is built on more than 25 years of experience in executive teaching in the area of information management.

 

The advent of AI&M is in line with the turmoil management is increasingly going through at this moment; information-based agility and innovation are central to any attempt to redefine management. The raison d’être of AI&M is in the strong belief that up-to-date management education and training should be rooted in the encounter of reflective learners, mirrored in its adage “Taking learners seriously”. This runs against the idea of learning wherever you are and whenever you want through courses increasingly offered via internet.

 

The indispensable creativity needed to anticipate organizational and societal disorder can, in the opinion of AI&M, only be achieved through in-depth dialogue between diversified participants from private and public organizations, academic institutions and the creative industry; in this constructive dialogue, we are all learners. The AI&M’s approach is to all intents and purposes learner-centered.

 

Further, AI&M takes a design-oriented stance in this process: not explaining the past (as many academics do), but co-building the future is the ultimate goal of its agenda. Through AI&M Wise, its unique eclectic method, AI&M is in the frontline of advancing (information)management as designing, i.e. as changing the world in a responsible and mindful way.

 

 

AI&M LEARNING MODEL

 

The AI&M learning model is based on the following tenets:

 

• Learning is not a luxury activity for the scant moments where we have time and money left, but an integral and permanent activity of organizations and individuals: innovation cannot be without imaginative learning, the learning individual is the mainstay of the innovating organization.

• Learning is not a one-way traffic (with toll levying), where one partaker is delivering knowledge and the other one absorbing that same knowledge. Learning takes place in the shared convergence of (partial and mutually complementary) knowledge of many in varying network connections. In short: “learning by sharing”.

• Learning doesn’t happen any more primarily within the closed world of one discipline, but in the encounter of worldviews offered by sciences, arts and daily practice.

• Learning doesn’t mean explaining the past through the use of abstract models (learning about the world), but contributing through concrete actions to the design of the future (learning in the world).

• Learning is not a distant activity, but demands a personal engagement based on values that give sense to our lives: professional and personal development are intrinsically intertwined.

 

 

AI&M COMMUNITY

 

AI&M is a true-life academy, a forum where learners meet. The AI&M community is a networked ‘community of practice’ in the real sense of the word: “It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally” (Lave & Wenger).

 

Participants in this community are ‘reflective practitioners’ and organizations who are ‘AI&M-ing’ at the invention, design, realization and continuance of information-based innovation in organizations. The ambition level of AI&M is high: “Action leadership through thought leadership”.