How do business school curriculums need to evolve?

So, this whole area of what is new and what is coming, be ahead and experiment with the new curriculum. When you innovate your curriculum, it is not going to happen that you are 100% correct. You may run a new course, it may not work, so try again. I would like to see more participation in the teaching as well as in course design by the practising people. They may not know the teaching methodology, but they do know the problems and aspirations, they know what issues are going to come up and we don’t have answers.

What has changed is the ubiquity of the internet, which has opened the sphere. Anybody with a computer and an idea can start up, and many of these start-up founders are not MBAs. Therefore, business schools need to get their students to perform better and get them through a higher rate of success. It’s all about are we producing them for something that is for the past or are we producing talent which has capabilities to deal with global tensions, the volatile recurring environment. It’s about how we infuse these skills into the ‘practise of business’, and this is not an India problem alone. It is a global dilemma.

What kind of a role would research play in making business schools ahead of the curve?

Arbitrarily, I am dividing research into two groups – regression-based research and field research. In the former, they want to prove how I can use a particular tool, but they pick up a not very relevant topic, neither is the output too relevant (most business schools do regression analysis research). Field research is the need of the hour. The dean of IIM-B said, we want to learn how to scale up a start-up. The question is clear. We said take four companies, two successful start-ups and two which didn’t succeed, and go all the way, history, details, outline their context, figure out issues and then create a set of questions that most people can use, versus taking a data of 5,000 companies and doing regression analysis.

Isn’t field research expensive? Will institutions be able to pull it off unless they get outside funding?

If you do field research, you will get more value, you are going to get something useful for the business, the faculty will learn a ton and that research will be read by many other faculties. This may be expensive, but the issue is not more money to be invested but changing the faculty’s mindset. Research is necessary for the faculty to be ahead of the curve. And, if it is field research, people from outside the institution will be willing to fund it.

Take the example of the research that we (me and Mr Mariwala) are going to do in IIM-B. One of the topics that has been identified is challenges in scaling up. We are going to look into how organisations select an idea and convert that into a proposition and then depending on the success of the proposition, how do they scale up from small to medium to large; what are the shifts that one needs to make in this journey; who can we rely on for examples of successful scale-ups and learnings from some failures. It will be a combination of research. Or, go to 5-6 companies which have done well in scaling up and what have they done right. This could culminate into either a report or a book. I have no doubt that if this goes along or if it looks very promising and needs more funding, it will be available.

The academia needs a significant dose of papers being published in journals. On the other hand, businesses also need to give importance to research done by the academia. Most business people can’t even name the journals let alone reading them, so that needs to change. In my time, Harvard Business School didn’t recognise the publications in HBR, they were not referring to it and it was their own backyard. We need to attack that part of it too.