This paper explores the potential impact of collaborative technologies in improving management
education. The first goal is to expose students to tools and practices that not only assist them
with their current studies, but also serve to reinforce individual and team competencies that can
facilitate their entry into the workforce. In their positions as future managers they will be
expected to not only be familiar with common business practices but also to understand the
implications of information technology for business; in this case with emphasis on tools and
techniques that can help businesses flourish in the networked economy. With an ever-increasing
recognition that e-learning tools are important for (re-)training employees, these three scenarios
offer examples of how business schools might expand the boundaries of e-collaboration to help
their students. These experiments have been conducted in management programs. In the first two
scenarios, students use collaborative platforms in some of their daily work. The third experiment
is based on a student-centred design of a learning portal. Our experience reinforces a certain
number of hypotheses influencing the impact of collaborative technologies in management
education. To begin with, information systems are often flawed mirrors of the managerial system
that they are designed to represent. Secondly, the potential value of collaborative technologies is
strongly influenced by organizational contexts, both in and between the university and the
business community. Thirdly, the effectiveness of collaborative technologies depends to a large
degree upon the depth and coherence of learning objectives fixed for learning and work places.
Finally, improving the effectiveness of collaborative technologies requires aligning the design of
learning environments with the corporate cultures and visions we are trying to reproduc