One part of strategic management involves managing the operations of a business or institute. This not only includes making day-to-day operations more efficient and productive but also looking at weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly issues. Good strategic management for operations involves having backup plans in place. For colleges, this includes adjunct professors who can pick up on classes or a list of alumni who can donate more during economic hardship. The teaching of operations management is an integral part of any college's strategic management courses.
Colleges with strategic management courses and degrees often encourage and engage in research on this topic. Professors and participants work in studies to discover what makes a workplace run more efficiently, test common beliefs on management and reward strategies and try to quantify the best strategy for being able to encourage innovation through management. These topics fall under the field of strategic management research. Colleges performing these studies can benefit by applying the findings to how they run their own institutions.
On the educational side, the number of graduate degrees offered in strategic management has increased as the demand for more good programs in this area has increased. Many large universities such as Boston College and Georgia Tech, among many others, offer master's or even doctoral degrees in strategic management. These programs will cover theory, research and the practical operations side of strategic management that is in demand in the business world.
While many colleges and universities offer courses and degrees in strategic management, this field contains many very practical applications for the schools themselves. Using the tenets of strategic management, studies can be done on what majors are happiest, and which are least, and how that translates to alumni donations. Emphasis can be put on the fields whose graduates send back the most in future donations and in programs on the rise versus those on the decline.