It was some time during October 2008 when an unexpected email from the President of Yale University took its staff and students by surprise. Joel Podolny, the star Dean of Yale's business school who had recently moved from Harvard, was to abruptly resign. Although the email plainly stated that Podolny was leaving Yale to lead 'educational initiatives at Apple', it became clear that he was personally requested by none other than Steve Jobs to lead one of his most secretive and ambitious dreams – the 'Apple University'. I was a visiting research scholar at Yale during that time, studying Yale School of Management's big curricular reform program. And my interviews and observations were clearly revealing Podolny's highly successful display of academic leadership, an extreme rarity in academia. Thus, the Apple University project must be a tremendous opportunity to be able to pull out a brilliant leader from the middle of one of the most critical transformations being tried in business education.

The media scampered around for months trying to find details about Apple University, especially because of the timing: Jobs' health was fading and the news about his liver transplant had been confirmed. But the efforts of media to find anything worth reporting were in vain. Oddly, Apple has always refused to comment on Apple University and attempts by the media to interview Podolny have been swiftly declined. As bizarre as it may sound for a project of its kind, the Apple University has virtually no digital footprint. It does not even have a website of its own or otherwise, never mind an official Twitter handle or a Facebook page.

Nevertheless, to those who kept following its progress, it was revealed through inside sources that for years Jobs had been planning a program that would perhaps be able to teach its future leaders to think 'like Steve' so that Apple could keep creating innovative products the 'Jobs way'. Thus, Apple University was an attempt to enable Steve Jobs to be replicated; albeit, to the disappointment of sci-fi movie buffs or to the followers of advancements in neurosciences, it is not to be in a lab hidden beneath Antarctican ice cover where Jobs' brain is secretly kept alive to be transplanted in a bionic body in the distant future, as some of his followers may have wished,. Apple University simply exists inside the Cupertino campus in California.

Indeed, Steve Jobs wanted to set up a mechanism where Apple could study itself. He was personally involved in setting up a course called 'What Makes Apple Apple' to codify the DNA of Apple as detailed in 'Inside Apple' by Adam Lashinsky. Importantly, in keeping with the rebellious spirit of Jobs, Apple University is not to be a 'university' in the traditional sense nor, it seems, is it to be similar to the other corporate initiatives such as that of GE or McDonald's Hamburger University