The assistant dean of innovation positions the College to lead the way when it comes to equipping students with the AI knowledge they need to secure career success
Andrew Schnackenberg
The Daniels College of Business has never been one to shy away from entrepreneurship and innovation. That includes the way it structures its programs, to keep up with the business world’s ever-changing demands.
This summer, Dean Naomi Boyd created a new leadership position to ensure the College continues to lead in the AI age. Andrew Schnackenberg is the inaugural assistant dean of innovation, a job that complements his work in the Department of Management, where he spearheaded a new AI curriculum.
“Daniels is building a dynamic and agile ecosystem that empowers students to think creatively, take risks, navigate uncertainty and execute,” said Naomi Boyd, dean of the Daniels College of Business. “This position is part of our drive to redefine higher education and advance our future.”
In an interview with the Daniels Newsroom, Schnackenberg assessed today’s AI environment and explained why his role is a critical piece of the education every Daniels student receives.
Why did Daniels create the assistant dean of innovation position?
AI technology is everywhere. We need to keep up.
We need to think outside the box and be a little bit more creative in how we deploy things like AI, how we rethink what the value proposition of higher education really is, what our degrees are worth and what they provide people.
We’re in the business of developing humans beyond just technical skills. If you come out of a business school with a degree, you should know how to use AI in a relatively sophisticated manner—meaning you know what it is, what a neural network is, what a token is, what an embedding is, what back propagation is, just go down the list. Do you know what a Claude project is? Do you know how to use different features like Claude design or Claude code? If you don’t know how to use these tools, your likelihood of even being considered for a modern job is deteriorating quick.
So that generates a bit of a paradox for us because, on the one hand, we don’t want to rely on AI so heavily in a university that it becomes the object of our training. And at the same time, we don’t want to ignore it to such an extent that we’re undermining our students’ competitiveness in the job market.
I think this role is a testament to the dean’s commitment to deploying AI more effectively and improving the experience for our students in every program.
I’ve heard your job described as “building a sandbox.” What does that mean and what does it look like here at Daniels?
A sandbox is an area for play. It’s an area for trial and error. It’s an area to create things and then destroy them and rebuild them. But I also think in some ways it’s actually a little bit constraining because it’s one place that you go to do something, and that’s not really what we’re after here. It’s to reach beyond the sandbox.
We will inevitably have to embrace a sandbox mentality. We need to play around, we need to make mistakes. We need to be OK with imperfection. We need to destroy our own creations and rebuild them. It’ll ideally be more of an embraced cultural characteristic. The solutions are right in front of us, in many ways. We just have to have the will and the commitment and the teamwork to actually pursue it.
One thing that I have been struck by in over a decade at Daniels is that we do embrace innovation. We have always been way more eager and excited and inquisitive about change than any university that I’ve ever been at, either as a student or as a faculty member or as a guest.
How have you approached the role so far?
I’ve just been meeting with individuals around Daniels about their expectations for innovation, their hopes, their dreams, the constraints that they face, whether it be in the classroom or administrative workflows or admissions work or whatever it is, just trying to understand where the pain points are and where the solutions are. And then from there, it’s consolidating insights and trying to figure out where the highest leverage ideas are, things that will really add value to the student experience, increase their odds of being placed in roles that they want to be placed in, increase the visibility and reputation of Daniels in the community, and cut costs where necessary.
Higher education has a reputation for moving slowly. How does Daniels keep pace with technology that is constantly changing?
We have to remember that there’s a reason institutions move slowly, and that’s because they’re cultural entities. And that’s a good thing: We’re cultural because we provide social value, social good.
Changes need to be mindful but they do need to be accelerated. From time to time, we need to unlock, unfreeze a little bit and then adopt the entrepreneurial mindset. And to do that, people in positions of authority need to be able to release the keys a little bit and let people make mistakes. If that can happen, then we’ll get there quickly.
If I’m a prospective student or the parent of a prospective student, why should I care that Daniels has created this position?
I think this position shows where we’re headed, where our emphasis is, where our priorities lie, and why your student would probably benefit from coming here, because we will be running at the vanguard of some of these changes.
I would say that you’re in good hands. We have a track record of succeeding at it, and we have a dean who supports it, and we have faculty and staff who have shown in their DNA to be able to handle change and be innovative.
Is there anything else we should know about the role or about the future?
One thing I would emphasize is that the future is bright. You can look at any stat—sentiment around the economy or political antipathy—there’s just a lot of anxiety right now. But I don’t know of a time where the opportunity for change has been greater. This should give us all a little pep in our step. We try so hard to do things stably, but we all have a chance to shake the cage right now, whether it’s industry or policy or even education. I’m confident that when things do settle down in 10-20 years, we’re going to look back at this as being a really exciting time. It would be a shame to miss that. There’s a lot of potential right now.