Other Canadian schools are taking an even more radical approach. Peggy Cunningham left a comfortable job at Queen’s University last year to take over as director of the School of Business Administration at Dalhousie University. She was drawn to the chance to help develop a different kind of M.B.A. program that promoted responsible leadership over a myopic focus on profits. Cunningham has since been named dean of the Faculty of Management. “I was troubled that business schools didn’t take more ownership and responsibility [for the financial crisis],” she says. “They see business as a sector with separate rules that isn’t part of society. Very few schools have been willing to take risks, trying to do something different.”

At Dalhousie, Cunningham says a key focus is seeing business as an activity that requires the co-operation of multiple stakeholders. That includes recognizing government as a potential partner, as well as local communities. She says business leaders also need to recognize that a single-minded pursuit of profit is ultimately unsustainable if companies are causing harm elsewhere. She points to snack-food makers that have moved to reduce the salt content of potato chips or oil companies that work closely with Aboriginal groups in Alberta’s tar sands as examples of such holistic approaches in action. While Cunningham acknowledges it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether such efforts are merely shrewd marketing tactics or a bid to appease regulators, she argues that many companies are finally being convinced that doing the right thing, even if not immediately profitable, can pay bigger dividends down the road. “There’s certainly a long-term business case,” she says, cautioning that the shift in thinking isn’t likely to happen overnight. “One of the problems of education is there hasn’t been enough asking of the big questions,” she adds. “I think it’s changing. I think that business people don’t want to just park their morals with their cars.”

The challenge remains educating potential students and employers, particularly in the U.S., about top Canadian business schools and their innovative programs. Adwoa Jones is a 32-year-old M.B.A. graduate from Ivey. She lives in the Washington area and is in the process of launching her own career-consulting business called Crystal Clear Interviews. She’s frequently surprised at how little U.S. companies know about Canadian business schools and recalls an early response she received from a major global consulting firm, who looked at her resumé and casually dismissed her application—apparently because she didn’t graduate from a U.S. business school. “I was told I don’t have American experience,” she says. “The company was Deloitte. I was shocked. They are a big international company.”

Jones, who was born in Ghana and attended high school in Brazil, blames an insular American culture, although she says that’s slowly changing. In the case of Ivey, Jones says several big New York-based investment banks and consulting firms now routinely hire from Ivey because they’ve had good experiences with the school. That awareness is likely only going to increase as Canadian schools continue to attract leading experts and put out ground-breaking research.

She also believes, based on conversations with colleagues working in foreign countries, that Canadian business schools have a growing reputation overseas, where they are perceived to offer a more “international” perspective on business than in the U.S.

At the same time, Canadian business schools need to avoid complacency. There’s no doubt the country’s unique business culture was a key asset in creating a stable financial sector, but it’s not immediately clear whether the approach can—or should—be applied to all areas of business.

There is much hand-wringing about the need for more innovation in Canada, and economists frequently lament the country’s dismal productivity scores (essentially a measure of how much money and manpower it takes to produce goods and services). Most of the country’s biggest companies are focused almost exclusively on the Canadian market. Indeed, there are relatively few firms like BlackBerry maker Research In Motion or athletic-wear maker Lululemon that have attempted to export their brand—a situation that doesn’t seem to be related to a lack of Canadian expertise, but of a dearth of global ambition and willingness to take risks.

Kaplan, for one, says there’s a marked difference between her students at Rotman and her former ones at Wharton in that regard. Where her American students were inclined to blow up existing business models and shelve successful products in pursuit of an innovative, market-leading approach, she says Canadians tend to avoid radical business strategies that threaten to cause conflict with employees or suppliers.

“The challenge for Canada is not better implementing its conservative model, it’s figuring out how innovation is going to happen,” she says. Which is why it’s a good thing that schools like Rotman, Dalhousie and others have spurned a traditional approach in favour of one that challenges people to think about business differently—because there are risks in not taking any risks too.