Ivey Business School - Western University

Ivey Business School at Western University — officially the Richard Ivey School of Business — was founded in 1922 in London, Ontario, making it one of Canada's oldest business schools. It operates as the business faculty of Western University, a publicly funded research institution, though Ivey maintains a distinct identity and operates with significant financial and programmatic autonomy. The school's founding mission was explicitly practical: to develop business leaders through active learning rather than passive instruction. That same commitment animates its work today, expressed most visibly through the Ivey Publishing case library, one of the largest repositories of business cases in the world, with over 9,000 cases used in more than 140 countries.

Accreditations and Rankings

• Triple Crown accredited: AACSB, EQUIS, and AMBA
• Financial Times Global MBA Ranking: consistently ranked among the top Canadian programs
• Bloomberg Businessweek MBA Ranking: ranked in the top tier for Canadian full-time MBA programs
• QS World University Rankings – Business & Management Studies (2024): Western University featured in the top 100 globally
• The Economist Which MBA?: Ivey's MBA has appeared in global top-100 rankings in recent years
• Canada's only business school with consistent representation across all three major international accrediting bodies alongside a case-method teaching model

Executive Education at a Glance

Ivey Executive Education is based primarily at the Ivey Spencer Leadership Centre in London, Ontario, and at its Toronto campus in the city's financial district — a deliberate strategic choice that puts programs within reach of Canada's largest corporate hub. The division offers both open-enrollment and custom (organizational) programs, with custom work making up a substantial portion of activity for clients including major Canadian banks, energy companies, and public-sector institutions. Topic strengths are concentrated in leadership development, strategic decision-making, analytics for managers, and organizational change — areas that map directly onto the case-method faculty's research and teaching expertise. Open programs range from two-day workshops to the flagship Advanced Management Program (AMP), a multi-week residential experience designed for executives stepping into enterprise-wide roles. Fees for open programs typically range from approximately CAD $4,000 for shorter workshops to CAD $25,000+ for the AMP, with alumni pricing available in some cases.

Campus and Facilities

The main Ivey building on Western's campus in London, Ontario, is a dedicated business school facility designed around tiered case-method classrooms — the amphitheater-style rooms are not an afterthought but the literal architectural center of the school's design philosophy. For executive participants, the Ivey Spencer Leadership Centre is the primary residential venue: a purpose-built conference and learning facility set on landscaped grounds that is deliberately removed from the distractions of a downtown office environment, allowing for the kind of sustained focus intensive programs require. Ivey's Toronto location on King Street West offers a contrasting urban setting, placing executive cohorts in the middle of Bay Street and giving programs a proximity to Canadian financial and professional services that London cannot replicate. Between the two sites, the school covers both reflective retreat and real-world immersion — a practical flexibility that few Canadian business schools can genuinely offer.

Faculty and Research

Ivey's faculty of approximately 120 scholars spans areas from organizational behavior and strategy to finance, entrepreneurship, and sustainability, with a notable emphasis on Canada-specific and emerging-market business contexts. The school is home to several dedicated research centres relevant to executive learners, including the Ivey Centre for Building Sustainable Value, one of Canada's most prominent academic hubs for business and sustainability research, and the Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab, which bridges financial technology research with practitioner application. Faculty members are active case writers as well as researchers — many hold dual roles in executive education delivery, meaning the person teaching a cohort of senior managers is typically the same person who produced the case being discussed. That connection between generation of knowledge and its delivery in the room is less common than business schools tend to claim, and at Ivey it is structurally embedded in how the institution operates.

Student Body, Alumni, and Career Outcomes

Ivey's executive education cohorts draw predominantly from Canada — unsurprisingly given the school's geographic positioning — but with meaningful representation from the United States and international participants, particularly in the residential AMP format. The broader Ivey alumni network numbers over 35,000 graduates globally, with particular density in Canadian financial services, consulting, energy, and consumer goods sectors; notable alumni include executives at the major Canadian chartered banks, several Fortune 500 companies, and prominent Canadian public institutions. For open-program participants, Ivey's network in the Canadian market is arguably its most tangible post-program asset: cohort relationships built at the Spencer Centre or in Toronto frequently translate into ongoing professional contact within a relatively concentrated and interconnected business community. The school does not publish executive education-specific placement data, which is standard practice for non-degree programs, but the alumni concentration in senior roles across Canada's largest employers speaks to the caliber of the typical participant.