IIM-B MBA in Business Analytics is designed to combine best of management & data analytics: Director

In an exclusive interview with Shiksha.com, IIM Bangalore director Professor Rishikesha T Krishnan talks about the b-school’s academic strategy, placement plans, upcoming courses and more.

Ranked as the second-best amongst all the IIMs in the  NIRF Rankings 2021, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore has proved itself once again. In an exclusive interview with Shiksha.com, IIM Bangalore director Professor Rishikesha T Krishnan spoke about the b-school’s academic strategy, placement plans, upcoming courses and more. Check out the complete interview below:

Q: IIM Bangalore secured the second rank in NIRF Rankings. How’s it to be among the top two for the past few years?

A: IIMB has been in the top 2 since the inception of NIRF, and #1 twice. This ranking reflects the quality of our programmes and focuses on excellence by our faculty, staff and students.

Q: What are you doing to stay ahead and re-visualize your institution?  

A: IIMB’s vision is “to be a global, renowned academic institution fostering excellence in management, innovation and entrepreneurship for business, government and society.”  As we look ahead, an important priority for IIMB is to further enhance our impact. We have multiple platforms that can enable us to do this:

The outstanding research capabilities of our faculty and specialized research centres offer us a significant opportunity to do contextually-relevant rigorous research that can contribute to addressing India’s myriad managerial, economic, societal and environmental challenges. Engaged Digital learning by blending MOOCs with synchronous learning as a way of reaching out to thousands of new learners.

Our new campus near Anekal provides the opportunity to nurture innovative leaders and entrepreneurs through new academic programmes in the most picturesque surroundings in keeping with IIMB’s mission.

Q: Is IIM Bangalore planning to start programme in Data Science, AI or ML?  What are the new courses and programmes that IIM Bangalore is planning to offer in the near future? 

A: IIMB has been an innovator in many respects. We have a complete bouquet of degree offerings in Management. Our new MBA programme in Business Analytics is specially designed to combine the best of management and data analytics. Our incubator, run under the aegis of the NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL), has a unique positioning in helping hundreds of qualified individuals start their first venture. We are the national leader in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with more than 40 courses in management offered on the edX, Swayam and IIMBx platforms. We follow a tenure track system to attract the best-qualified research-oriented faculty.

Over the next few years, I hope IIMB will have a strengthened portfolio of MBA programmes; a good undergraduate programme at our new campus; at least one-degree programme with mass appeal running on the MOOCs platform; deep impact on policy; and an even stronger reputation for high-quality research than it has today.

Q: Management education is going through a transformation phase what sectors are going to see a surge in demand for management graduates?  

A: Companies that recruit from B-Schools are likely to look for candidates who can cope with contingencies and manage well in a VUCA world.   

The Government’s Atmanirbhar Bharat programme seeks to not only to Make in India, but Make for the World. The government has already announced production-linked incentives for companies setting up capacity in India in a variety of priority industries. More such announcements are expected. Recent changes in agricultural policy are expected to create new opportunities for the corporate sector in agriculture and food processing. The country’s experience during COVID suggests that much needs to be done to enhance the quantum and quality of healthcare services in India. The country will need qualified managers to drive all these initiatives.

Of course, the skill set required by the manager of tomorrow will be different. Elements of Industry 4.0 (automation; Internet of Things; 3-D printing; data warehousing and analytics, etc.) are becoming an integral part of contemporary manufacturing. Contemporary services businesses are dependent on technology and advanced data analytics. The core principles of marketing, finance or operations management are likely to remain the same, but a successful manager will need to integrate a good understanding of technology and data with the traditional functional skills.

Q: How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact IIM Bangalore’s academic and placement strategy? 

A: IIM Bangalore sustained its commitment to excellence during 2020-21 despite all the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

During the early days of the pandemic, IIMB’s priority was to offer the best possible educational experience to all our students who began attending classes online. Towards this, we made special efforts to upgrade our digital education infrastructure and the digital teaching skills of our faculty. Our students have appreciated these efforts. We blended the asynchronous courses designed for our highly successful MOOCs platform with synchronous learning on digital platforms to offer integrated digital learning experiences to supplement our classroom learning.

IIMs are fairly flexible; at IIMB we didn’t have much difficulty in adapting to online classes. Unlike technology institutes, we don’t have physical laboratories, so shifting classes online wasn’t difficult. What we do have is a lot of interaction in the classroom, and so long an online platform allows sufficient interaction to happen, it is possible to teach online. Of course, we had to take some steps, such as we needed some technology improvement, the faculty needed to understand the technology and a little training and orientation, but at IIM Bangalore we were able to do it quite fast partly because we already have invested a lot in online education thanks to our MOOCs platform.

Though our faculty are no strangers to distance teaching and learning using technology, we realized that a structured approach would help to manage the COVID-induced online transition. We quickly put together a team of our most tech-savvy and experienced online teachers and the chairs of our key academic programmes to chart out our approach. Feedback from faculty suggested that they would be most comfortable teaching in a classroom setting and that they would like to have as clear a view of the students as possible. So, we rapidly upgraded the infrastructure in about 20 classrooms to include a large screen to see the students; a large digital writing board; and another monitor to follow the chat. We trained a group of Online Learning Facilitators (OLFs) – staff who help the faculty seamlessly move between different modes in the classroom. Our core team offered a series of workshops to faculty to help them use the available technology resources as well as the features of the online platform (breakouts, polls, etc.) in the best possible way. Faculty were also encouraged to make modifications in their course content, pedagogy and evaluation to suit the new medium. The feedback I have suggests that these efforts paid off.

Specifically, as far as curriculum is concerned: Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic has raised questions about many aspects of the business. In 2019, when I was teaching my Strategy course, we discussed case studies on the airline industry and Airbnb. We never imagined that the airline and hospitality industries would be in such dire straits just 6 months later.

Issues related to supply chain management, contingency planning, employee health and safety, and business continuity management have come to the fore. I am sure these topics will figure more prominently in our curriculum in the days ahead.

We realized early that we need to curate a “social learning experience,” and organized a number of online forums, games and informal events to facilitate this process. Our students have themselves taken many initiatives to keep their clubs and other activities running virtually. I am amazed by the quality of the student events online – the opening cultural event organized by our first-year MBA students online showed not only their cultural talent but their technical prowess and was of professional quality. Clearly, our current MBA students are multi-faceted.

Full credit is due to our students for adapting to constraints of bandwidth, space, power outages, and other activities happening around them in their homes as they have navigated the months of online learning.

Notwithstanding the fact that we have made our online learning experiences as good as possible, we expect that students will still see value in face-to-face classes once the pandemic recedes. This will be particularly true for subjects that require intensive discussion and debate. So, the classroom is far from obsolete, it will come back with a bang soon.

I am happy to report that our students have done remarkably well in getting placed in the most challenging roles in 2020-21. They have been recruited by reputed companies despite COVID-19 disruptions. All the placement processes were conducted online.

Q: How is the institution working on improving gender diversity at campus?  

A: IIMB has a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion. We have an Institute-wide Diversity and Inclusion Committee to evangelize and ensure diversity and inclusion in both recruitment and student enrolment. We are known to be the best Institute in India to support students with disabilities (for which we won a national award in 2012).

We have fairly good diversity – not just in terms of gender but on several other fronts, in our academic programmes, in our faculty body and on our Board.

As I mentioned earlier, IIMB is a leader in supporting students with disabilities. In 2009, we set up an Office for Disability Services (ODS) to provide a nodal point of support to all students with disabilities. The ODS ensures that every student with a disability admitted to IIMB get as good an educational and campus experience as every other student.

IIMB has pioneered the NSR Pre-doc Programme, a unique mentoring and educational initiative to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds get admission to doctoral programmes. This is intended to improve the availability of qualified candidates for faculty positions from the reserved categories in the years ahead.

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