I am often asked, “Does MOT (Management of Technology) refer to an MBA offered by technical universities?”, but I do not think that is an accurate interpretation of the topic. After all, while an MBA is a degree related to graduate school-level business administration, MOT is one of the specialized areas of business administration. The letter “M” in MOT does not stand for “Master.” Therefore, it would not be a problem if there were a course called MOT in the curriculum of a Department of Business Administration.

MOT, which is said to have been created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a part of an academic field based on manufacturing-related techniques and methods, such as production control and quality control, which Japan specializes in. Therefore, it can be considered as an academic field with the same rank as Finance and Marketing, for instance. In fact, MIT, considered the birthplace of MOT, along with Harvard Business School, offer this course as “Operations Management” and “Technology and Operations Management,” respectively, as part of their MBA curricula.

The AMBA (Associations of MBAs), one of the main global accreditation bodies of MBAs in Europe, stipulates 13 areas that need to be covered by MBA education (Accreditation Criteria 7.3). In it, some elements of MOT are specified as one of the courses that should be offered:

Therefore, if an institution is to offer a graduate-level management education curriculum centered on the MOT topic, it is natural to follow the trend of world-level business schools and name it “M.Sc. Management of Innovation” (such as in the Rotterdam School of Management). Moreover, if the proposal is to offer a wide range of MOT courses on top of a systematic set of MBA courses stipulated by AMBA, a title such as “MBA in Technology Management” (such as at Shanghai Jiao Tong University) would be suitable.