Canada-based Richard Ivey School of Business (Ivey), which provides company-specific customised executive education programmes, is planning to start a consortium executive programme in India.
The programme, which Ivey claims to be a first-of-its-kind initiative by any B-school in India, offers tailored courses to a bunch of companies at one go to cater to their requirements.
“This consortium method is very popular abroad, while it is new to India. We will soon start our first programme in Mumbai by taking five companies from the financial vertical,” said Ariff Kachra, strategy professor and managing director, Ivey India.
Ivey has been working with 200 corporations in India to provide executive education to the middle and senior level managers.
It has already developed 35 such programmes, which are expected to be implemented in the coming years, he said. Recently, it has completed this tailored programme for Aircel and Gail Limited.
Indian economic and business scenario is going through a paradigm shift. Many Indian companies are now aiming at having a global presence, striving for innovation and strategic thinkers. The senior managers need to have depth knowledge in decision-making, being aware of competition and for strategy execution, he said.
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“Currently, the percentage of Indian companies buying the executive education programme is very small as compared to other countries including North America. There is a huge opportunity to tap at the high-end managerial level,” he said.
The duration of the tailored programme varies from six to 18 months, depending on the company requirement, with a per day fee of between $15,000 and $25,000.
Ivey India is also planning to expand its footprint in research, the number of case studies and faculty training. It is planning to develop 100 India-focussed business case studies, train 500 faculty members and conduct 12 workshops per year in the next two years. So far, it has trained 400 faculty members and developed 200 cases.
“Recently, Ivey has overtaken the Harvard Business School in the number of case studies and its collection of India-focussed business case studies are now the largest in the world with 200 cases,” he said.
Ivey India has collaborated with Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB) and Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon. to develop joint case studies.
It has started a ‘case development centre’ at ISB in 2009, which promotes and mentors faculty and research scholars from business schools in India through a comprehensive process of case development – from generating ideas to publishing case studies globally.
It has tied up with Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B) for research activities and has already invested $150,000. “Knowledge dissemination will be our major focus area in the coming years. And, we will increase our funding to do more research on Indian companies,” he said.