IIMs to meet twice a year to 'share best practices'

Plan expansion of fellow programs to meet faculty shortage

While the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bill draft which looks to bring in all IIMs together formally is still in abeyance, the premier B-schools have voluntarily decided to meet twice a year for sharing of best practices in research, teaching, and administration, among other areas.

At least, 13 of the top IIMs met here for the inaugural of the Pan-IIM World Management Conference 2016, the fourth such edition that was held at IIM Ahmedabad. The previous editions of the conference were organised by IIM Calcutta (2013), IIM Kozhikode (2014) and IIM Indore (2015).

Talking about the decision, Ashish Nanda, director of IIM Ahmedabad said, "From this year onwards, IIMs have decided to fully fund the Pan-IIM World Management Conference on our own. The quality of papers and participation is comparable to the best conferences in the world. We had discussions on how to coordinate our activities and learn from one another. We have also decided that we will try to meet at least twice a year to continue to learn from one another."

Seconding Nanda, Ajit Prasad, director of IIM Lucknow said, "We have decided to meet twice a year for sharing of best practices. This is not take away the individuality of each of the IIM but to look at a more homogenous system."

The IIM directors also had discussions over improving the quality of their faculty development programs and doctoral programmes for churning out quality faculty, apart from improving the quality of research, especially in terms of local context.

As per Rishikesha T Krishnan, director of IIM Indore, the IIMs have been encouraging candidates to complete doctoral programs.

"As institutions, we are looking at expanding the fellow programme in management (FPM), which we discussed on how we could collaborate for the same. FPM is a resource intensive program. Hence, if we can collaborate we should be able to produce more number of doctorates which can be the next pool of faculty for the institutions," said Krishnan.

The conference, which looked to provide an excellent opportunity for academicians, researchers, practitioners, policymakers and thought leaders to exchange their ideas and foster collaboration, was based on the theme of 'India towards better governance'. The theme of the conference emphasised on inviting researchers to explore the management lessons from a successful public and private organisations and institutions that can be applied to the Indian government and its associated organisations (public and private) in order to make them more efficient and effective.

In other moves, some of the institutes are also inducting more senior executives from industry who have sufficient experience and enrolling them into executives fellow programmes in management.

After their meeting with union minister for human resource development Prakash Javadekar in September, the IIMs have also begun working towards inducting faculty from under-represented minorities such as SC and ST.

"We are very much aware that we should have a diverse faculty with different life experiences. We particularly want to make sure that people who are socio-economically backward get all opportunities be in the classroom and share their knowledge. Each IIM is encouraging these under-represented minorities, as we call them, to join faculty development programs and faculty posts while maintaining the highest quality. Some of the IIMs are coming up with some very interesting ideas," said Nanda.

One such example was that of IIM Kashipur which has begun a special drive to enrol SC/ST doctoral students into its fellow programs. "We are in the middle of this special drive to bring in SC/ST doctoral students in the FPM program where we will also train them to become IIM faculty. Five years down the line we will find out whether the experiment is successful or not," said Gautam Sinha, Director of IIM Kashipur to which other IIM directors affirmed that they would learn from the newer B-school's experimental move.

Meanwhile, talking about challenges faced by IIMs, Saibal Chattopadhyay, Director, IIM Calcutta said that the conference gave the B-schools an opportunity to acknowledge challenges that IIMs were facing and collectively decide on how to tackle the same.

"Faculty availability across IIMs is a big issue. There are innovative ways to collaborate programs across IIMs and there are certain things we are discussing. This is to take care of excellence that IIMs have built over the years at a time . We have to be careful about the quality and over time ensure that education and research from IIMs are of the highest quality. These are the challenges we are trying to grapple with," said Chattopadhyay.