Marketing Business Education: Searching for Innovation
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Article by: S.S. George
Director, ICMR (IBS Center for Management Research)
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Innovate on Products : Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
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To an organization willing to take risks, today's business and business education environment present as many opportunities as threats. Niche segments are constantly appearing in the market, and designing and delivering programs catering to these segments will help expand the scope of a business school's operations. In addition to identifying and catering to niches, business schools need to be flexible in designing the curricula for their mainstream programs. Gone are the days when curricula were like five year plans. Now, schools must be flexible, constantly tweaking and fine-tuning the course content and structure to make them attractive both to students and recruiters. They must interact constantly with the industry (not just at the time of placement, as is the case with most schools today) to identify leading indicators of changes in employment demand, and design their programs according to demand.
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Innovate on Processes: Minimize the Time Lag between Idea and Action
The same sense of urgency with which well run businesses execute their plans must be repeated in business schools. Ideas must be implemented quickly. Of course, proposals must be evaluated - but delaying implementation for too long risks the possibility that by the time a program or course reaches the market, it is out-of-date. And if this sense of urgency leads to occasional failures, these should be regarded a fair price to pay for moving quickly.
Create an Innovative Organization: Throw Out the Old, Bring in the New
Business schools need to re-examine their organization structure and the kind of people they recruit. Is the traditional, hierarchical structure that we find in most educational institutions flexible and responsive enough to meet the needs of today's students and employers? Are the faculty members capable of inspiring and energizing tomorrow's managers? It is an unfortunate truth that in India, a Ph.D. in management is often - though not always - the last refuge of the unemployed, or even the unemployable, MBA. To what extent should business schools be slaves to ranking systems that provide arbitrary, and often unjustified, weightage to the number of such doctorates among the faculty? Business schools, to be prepared to meet the challenges of the present and the future, require merit-based (rather than seniority-based) organization structures and systems that value and reward research and publication as much as degrees. To build credibility in the market, the faculty members themselves must demonstrate some of the characteristics of successful managers - foresight, flexibility, and innovativeness.
And to Conclude...
In the next few years, one can expect to find non-government institutions and initiatives playing a prominent role in business education in India. However, it is very likely that the successful institutions among them will look, and feel, a lot different from the business schools which are considered to be the top schools today.