Western University: Ivey

Ivey Business School at Western University, officially the Richard Ivey School of Business, was founded in 1922 at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, making it one of the oldest business schools in the country. Western is a publicly funded research university, and Ivey operates as its flagship business faculty — a school with an identity distinct enough that it is widely known simply as "Ivey" across the Canadian executive and corporate landscape. The school's founding philosophy centered on developing practical business judgment rather than purely theoretical knowledge, a mission it has pursued with unusual consistency for over a century. Today that philosophy is institutionalized in its near-total reliance on the case method — Ivey is the second-largest producer of business cases in the world after Harvard, publishing roughly 300 new cases annually from its Ivey Publishing division. That volume of proprietary, current, field-researched material shapes every executive program the school runs.

Accreditations and Rankings

Accreditations:

• AACSB (Triple Crown)
• EQUIS (Triple Crown)
• AMBA (Triple Crown)

Ivey holds all three major international business school accreditations — a distinction achieved by fewer than 1% of business schools worldwide.

Rankings:

• Financial Times Executive Education Open Programs: Ranked globally (2023)
• Financial Times Executive Education Custom Programs: Ranked globally (2023)
• QS World University Rankings – Business & Management: Top 100 globally (2023)
• Bloomberg Businessweek MBA Rankings: Among top Canadian programs (2023)
• Maclean's: Consistently ranked the #1 MBA program in Canada

Executive Education at a Glance

Ivey Executive Education operates out of the school's Toronto location at 130 King Street West — deliberately placed in the heart of Canada's financial district rather than on the London campus — which signals exactly who it is designed for. The portfolio spans open-enrollment programs and custom corporate programs, with particular strength in leadership development, strategy, finance for non-financial managers, and general management. The school's flagship open program is the Ivey Accelerated Management Program (AMP), an intensive residential experience that brings together mid-to-senior managers from across industries for immersive, case-based learning. Other well-regarded open programs include the Advanced Management Program for senior executives and a suite of offerings in analytics, negotiation, and organizational change. Program durations typically range from two days to several weeks, and fees for open programs generally run from approximately CAD $3,000 for shorter modules to CAD $15,000–$20,000 or more for multi-week residential programs. Custom programs are designed in close collaboration with corporate clients and can involve both on-site and Ivey-hosted delivery. Online and blended formats have expanded since 2020, but Ivey's strongest executive programs remain anchored in in-person, case-debate delivery.

Campus and Facilities

Ivey's primary executive education home is in downtown Toronto, a deliberate choice that plants participants directly inside Canada's most concentrated business ecosystem — Bay Street finance, global law firms, major mining and energy headquarters, and the TSX are all within walking distance. The Toronto facility at 130 King Street West offers purpose-built case-method classrooms, tiered seminar rooms designed for debate, and client meeting spaces suitable for private corporate sessions. The London campus at Western University adds a more traditional residential feel for programs that run there, set within Western's sprawling, architecturally coherent grounds that date to the university's 1878 founding. Participants who attend multi-day residential programs in London benefit from the focused environment that comes from being removed from the daily interruptions of office life, a deliberate feature of the longer leadership programs.

Faculty and Research

Ivey's faculty of roughly 160 scholars spans disciplines including strategy, organizational behavior, finance, operations, and entrepreneurship, with a notable concentration of expertise in areas directly relevant to Canadian and emerging-market business contexts — natural resources, family enterprise, and sustainability in extractive industries among them. Many faculty maintain active consulting and board relationships with major Canadian corporations, which feeds current, fieldwork-based cases directly into classroom use rather than recycling dated material. The school houses several research centers with executive relevance, including the Lawrence National Centre for Policy and Management, the Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab, and the Pierre L. Moreau Centre focused on entrepreneurship and family enterprise. Ivey faculty publish in top-tier journals but are equally evaluated on case production, an unusual institutional incentive that keeps research tethered to practice in a way that is structurally different from most research universities.

Student Body, Alumni, and Career Outcomes

Executive Education cohorts at Ivey draw heavily from Canadian industry — financial services, mining and energy, manufacturing, and professional services dominate — but international participants, particularly from the United States and emerging markets, make up a meaningful share of longer programs. The broader Ivey alumni network numbers over 30,000 graduates across more than 100 countries, with particularly dense concentrations in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. Notable alumni include senior figures at firms such as Scotiabank, Brookfield Asset Management, Manulife, and McKinsey Canada, reflecting Ivey's historic dominance as a feeder school for Canadian corporate leadership. For executive participants specifically, the value of the Ivey network lies less in formal career placement — most arrive already in senior roles — and more in the peer relationships built during case discussions, which in a Canadian context often means sitting across the table from people who will later be counterparts, clients, or board members.