Shorter MBA courses in the offing

Even as most institutes in the country face an acute shortage of quality faculty members, Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, is quietly charting a route to ensure its planned hike in student intake is proportionate to the number of faculty members.

Also in the pipeline are the institute's first joint research project with international universities and plans to introduce shorter duration MBAs and long duration customised executive programmes.

ISB at present has a student intake of 418 students cumulatively for all its programmes and plans to hike it to 560 students in the next three years. Considering the expansion in student number, the institute is on a drive to hire faculty from India and visiting professors from abroad for its post graduate management and customised executive programmes.

Currently, ISB has around 23 full-time faculty members. The institute is planning to take the number to 40 faculty members in the next two years. For the academic year 2006-2007, the institute had 100 visiting faculty from abroad for its programmes and expects the number to go up considerably.

"The institute is looking at academicians with specialised domain knowledge to teach and also lead two new centres of excellence being planned this year," said Rammohan Rao, Dean, ISB.

The two new centres would be on strategic marketing and leadership and change management in addition to the ones on analytical finance, global logistics and manufacturing strategies, IT and networked economy, Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurial Development and leadership and change management.

ISB has entered into joint development research with Wharton business school of the University of Pennsylvania and Kellog school of Management, affiliated to the Northwestern University, which is the institute's first collaboration with an international university for research. Rao said one proposal was being studied by faculty members of ISB as well as the other two business schools.

ISB began its customised executive education to participants from abroad in 2005 and has trained about 150 executives so far.

However, with companies requesting for customised programmes at their offices abroad, the institute has recently gone to Sri Lanka and the middle east as opposed to the participants coming to the institute campus. The programmes have been bordered around leadership, strategy and general managerial competencies.

With growing interest in customised executive education programmes, the institute is mulling introduction of multi-phased long duration programmes for the same. It is also planning to introduce part time programmes and weekend aggregated MBA's within the next two years.