It has been over two years since Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) set up its own shop in India. Till then, the not-for-profit publishing arm of Harvard Business School (HBS) operated through two different firms. Its iconic magazine, Harvard Business Review (HBR) was published in India through the India Today Group and its books were marketed and distributed by McGraw-Hill.
What makes HBPI bullish on India is not just the IIMs and their ilk, but the hunger for content from India one of the world’s fastest growing economies. So, it has set up a research centres in India and already sits on 100 case studies originating on Indian companies. These will become fodder for its educational and training products in the US. Currently, each of its three businesses – corporate learning, higher education and publishing – bring roughly one-third each of its India revenues.
Vanita Kohli-Khandekar met with HBP CEO, David A Wan on a recent visit to India. Edited excerpts:
What has it been like, being on your own in India?
The objective (of being here as a fully owned subsidiary) was to have greater local presence. Many of the larger educational publishing companies look at India as a market to export to. We are not just here to export but also to chase the supply of ideas, on innovation and strategy, among other things, emerging out of India. Some of our work involves working with IIMs and their faculty to develop case studies we would like to incorporate in our books, magazines and other services. There is a lot of demand from the US for case studies from India and other countries.
This (being here on our own) helps establish a more direct relationship with faculty, schools, readers, etc because now we publish ourselves.
What is the tinkering you have to do to the product while selling in India?
India is at a different stage of openness to e-learning or blended learning tools. For instance, IIM (Kolkata) was not a case study school; they have now started it. So, the faculty needs to be comfortable teaching cases; we facilitate that (HBS started the case approach to teaching). There are 30 teachers from different schools (in India) going to Boston and learning the case method on the HBS campus.
We also have to change our model because schools wanted predictability in pricing and lower prices. So, we have site licences in India. For instance we have 38 schools which license our course materials. They pay a fixed fee per student for unlimited access to all our materials. In the US, the fee is per case per user. So, Indian schools get the same materials for one-third the US price.
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In corporate learning, even if I exclude our global clients operating in India, we have 40 companies buying our services. We see a lot of demand because of companies wanting to scale training and development in the area of management and leadership. There we bring in a mix of content – HBR articles, simulation case studies, online articles and so on. We also bring in experts, which could be HBS faculty or our authors. We have a lot of content in this area and have done this (supply content for corporate learning) for hundreds of thousands of companies globally.
In consumer publishing (books, magazines), we have already started selling two times what was being sold. This is because unlike the typical reseller who would stock only the best-selling stuff, we stock the entire range. Also, earlier prices were pegged to the US price. Now they are independent of the US price, which makes it affordable.
As publishers of business books, cases studies and pedagogy, what are the opportunities and threats the net and new devices offer?
Fifteen years ago when the net bubble took off, most publishers decided to put their content online for free. So, for very long users have lived with the idea that anything online is free. Now the same publishers are trying to get money online! We never put our content on the net for free. In whatever way – subscription, licence, fee – we charge for our content.
In the US, the number of our books bought as Amazon’s Kindle are higher each week than the total sold by Barnes and Noble, the largest book retail chain. Again, 20 per cent of the total book purchases in the US are by Amazon Kindle, up from nothing two years ago. After 2008, book sales had fallen, but they rose again because of e-Books. And, the unit prices are comparable, too. We are creating more formats that will help us sell through iPad. For instance, for HBR we have created a tablet application called Zinio.
However, in the US, we have to live and spend our money in both worlds, the old and new. So, even while we sell our products online, we have to maintain our subscription databases in the usual way, too.
Do you see patterns in what works in emerging and mature markets?
There is more opportunity for us to move our development faster in India than in China or Latin America. A lot of our concepts cannot be translated easily and translation is a challenge in those markets. In India, there is English and also a large number of professional schools. Mobile devices, too, are a bigger opportunity in India than the US. There is a group working in Boston to develop Harvard Management Monitor, which will deliver topics in management on the mobile.
