The Rs 350-crore executive education market in India has attracted players from across the world. Canada-based Richard Ivey School of Business (Ivey) is one of the latest entrants. Ariff Kachra, strategy professor & managing director, Ivey India, the Indian chapter of Ivey, tells M Saraswathy about its India plans. Excerpts:
Ivey has signed MoUs with Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Are you planning to tie up with any other institution?
Ivey is concentrating on the existing tie-ups. We are collaborating with ISB to develop joint case studies and aim to be the largest source of Indian cases by mid-2012. At IIM-B, the focus is on incentive research. We are planning to increase the funding to IIM-B from the present $150,000. Next year, a contingent of Ivey faculty will come to India to work on four to five new projects. The aim is to have three to four joint publications in a year. We have no plans of further tie-ups.
What do you think of the executive education programmes in India?
Executive education programmes here suffer from a number of lacunae. Firstly, the programmes here are run by non-PhD faculty. Only 30 per cent of the Ivey staff is part of their executive education programme, unlike Indian B-schools where most of the faculty is into executive education. India has a deficit for executive development programmes for the top level management, though some organisations do have programmes for middle level management. If these problems are resolved, India can become the seat of executive education for the world.
What are Ivey’s initiatives, especially in terms of executive education?
Ivey has been working with 20 different corporations in India to provide executive education to the middle-senior level managers for the past five months. It is tailored to their needs and it is custom designed. There will be an active focus on Mumbai for the next few years, as the city houses the maximum number of corporations. But that does not mean that we would reject requests coming from other cities.
How is your programme different?
We are one of the largest sources of cases. There is a knowledge creation environment in our programmes where there is no separation of theory and practice.
How are Indian corporations different from your clients in other countries?
The willingness to pay for quality education is more among other countries than in India. The quality of faculty is the most important criteria abroad, whereas in India it is the quality of the institutes. But gradually, Indian corporations are demanding tangible outcomes from executive education programmes and mere affiliation value does not suffice.
