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In anticipation of the demands of its constituents, management schools have to deal with the dual challenge facing management education: the challenge of relevance, in particular to integrate the subject of corporate social responsibility (CSR) into the management curriculum, and the challenge to develop and implement innovative learning methods for educating students. This article seeks to expound on these challenges.

The authors first reflect on the imminent and essential need to pay attention to CSR, as driven by general trends and developments in the corporate context as well as by recent business scandals. The uses, roles and functions of simulations are then reviewed, followed by a report of a project at Rotterdam University/HES, a Dutch university of professional education, that aimed to counter both identified challenges. This project involved two simulations in the field of CSR.

Recognizing the changes in this environment, opines that the school has to reconsider its approach to management education consequently if it wants to offer relevance to the communities the school serves. At the same time, the school has to explore new methods of learning that contribute to creating effective management learning environments. Simulations, particularly since they enable comprehensive learning, may offer a viable and fertile direction to achieving this objective. The conclusions drawn from this project and the project evaluations clearly support this.

Based on the experiences, the article identifies a number of conditions for the effective implementation of innovative educational projects, which include the school having a vision on CSR and displacing learning responsibilities.

This study aims to examine the full mediating role of supply chain flexibility (SCF) between lean production (LP) and business performance (BP) found in the previous literature. This effect negates the direct LP-BP effect (the so-called “total eclipse effect”). The authors analyze the individual contributions that the different SCF dimensions (sourcing flexibility; operating system flexibility, distribution flexibility and information system [IS] flexibility) make to the “total eclipse effect” between LP and BP produced by SCF. The relational resources-based view and resource orchestration theory are used to support the theoretical framework.

Covariance-based structural equations modeling (CB-SEM) is used to test the SCF LP-BP total eclipse hypothesis and four additional mediation hypotheses, one for each of the SCF dimensions. Data obtained via a questionnaire given to 260 companies are analyzed with CB-SEM, and SPSS Process is used to evaluate the mediation effect.

Research results indicate that only one of the dimensions (operating system flexibility) has a full mediation effect between LP and BP and is, therefore, the main contributor to the eclipse effect. Two other dimensions (sourcing flexibility and distribution flexibility) have partial mediation effects, so they also contribute to developing the eclipse effect, although to a lesser extent. Finally, IS flexibility is neither a full nor a partial mediation factor and does not contribute to the eclipse effect.

These findings have some important implications. For academia, they generate new knowledge of the role that each of the SCF dimensions or components plays in the LP-BP relationship. For company management, the findings offer supply chain managers specific information on the individual effects that the different types of SCF flexibility have between LP and BP. This will allow companies to target their efforts to develop certain types of flexibility in LP contexts depending on the outcomes that senior managers want to achieve with their SCs.