US-headquartered Harvard Business School (HBS) has finally found an address for its executive education classroom in India. The B-school, beginning this March, will offer executive programmes at the Taj Lands End, at Bandra, in suburban Mumbai.
The space at the hotel will be an amphitheatre-style classroom fashioned after the ones at Harvard Business School in Boston. The B-school has been conducting executive education or management development programmes (MDPs) in India since 2008 at five-star hotels.
HBS and its India Research Center (IRC), which was set up in 2006, offer three executive education programmes in India. This year, while it has already offered one executive education programme, it will offer two more between March and May 2012.
HBS is charging Rs 2,29,250 for its programme of ‘Building a Global Enterprise in India’ in March. It will charge Rs 2,04,750 for its programme on ‘Develop India — Real Estate Strategies for Growth’, to be offered in May.
India’s growing Rs 350-crore executive education space continues to attract B-schools. The Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, will also have its own centre in India. “We will have office space and classrooms. We are looking at a centralised location and Mumbai that will suit our needs the most, as of now. Within the next two years we will have a physical presence in India. Through the centre, we will not only conduct executive education, but will also use it as a place for the alumni to converge and our faculty to convene for research,” Jason Wingard, vice-dean, Executive Education at Wharton told Business Standard.
Wharton joins the likes of University of Chicago, Tuck School of Business, INSEAD, Oxford University’s Said Business School and Duke University, among others, to offer their executive education programmes in India. "We have realised that many of the emerging markets continue to grow, and it is important for us to have a variety of locations around the world. We are present in India, China and Brazil.” Wharton receives about 10,000 executive education participants on its campus every year and India is among the top three countries in terms of participants from outside the US.
Wharton has started a certificate programme, ‘Accelerated Development Program’, for business leaders in India from January 2012. Track one of the programme will have three Wharton executive education programmes in India at Rs 6,60,000 (plus service tax). Track two will see two executive education programmes in India and one in Philadelphia in the US for Rs 500,000 (plus service tax) and Wharton Philadelphia programme at a discount of 25 per cent.
