INTRODUCTION Business education has been largely function-centric since it emerged from its origins in Schools of Economics. The science of wealth became a practical apprenticeship in general business commerce. Curricula were based on a core of fundamentals; studies in such areas as Accounting, Economics, Finance, Information Systems, Management, Marketing, and Operations Research. Beyond the fundamentals core, graduate business programs offered breadth courses and electives in such areas as New Product Development, Entrepreneurship, Business and Society, International Business, Real Estate, and Banking. Most programs offered an end-of-program capstone course in business or management strategy. Economists' theory of the firm often became lost amidst disconnected and unrelated course offerings. Meanwhile, the radical downsizing of corporate America and innovations such as business process reengineering led function-centric business organizations into the post industrial information age. Porter's (1985) Value Chain principles have been widely discussed in the business research literature and have been applied in many businesses.
