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Business News/ Companies / People/  Technology will be woven into most courses: Sushil Vachani
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Technology will be woven into most courses: Sushil Vachani

Vachani talks about the lack of diversity in Indian management schools and the push for open online courses at IIM-B

Sushil Vachani says the IIMs have to revisit their admission criteria, and market themselves like any healthy organization. Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/MintPremium
Sushil Vachani says the IIMs have to revisit their admission criteria, and market themselves like any healthy organization. Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint

Bangalore: The newly appointed director of the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore and Boston University veteran Sushil Vachani has three clear priorities: Increase the use of technology in courses, push for social impact through more entrepreneurship and help increase the institute’s international exposure. By recruiting Vachani, IIM-Bangalore has become the second IIM after IIM-Ahmedabad to recruit a director from a foreign higher education institution. Like Ashish Nanda at IIM-Ahmedabad, the former Boston Consulting Group executive also graduated from Harvard and IIM-Ahmedabad. Both Nanda and Vachani, who are friends, have also worked at the Tata Administrative Service. Vachani spoke about his priorities, the lack of diversity in Indian management schools and the push for massive open online courses (MOOCs) at IIM-Bangalore. Edited excerpts:

You’ve been at Harvard Business School and IIM-A. How do these two worlds compare?

In some ways the worlds are similar. At least the top institutions. Places like Stanford, Yale, Harvard—they’ve got very smart students as do the IIMs. But there is a difference. The difference is that...at IIM-A or at IIM B, the average student would probably have stronger academic credentials and a higher GMAT score. So they’re really smart students. But in terms of the mix between background and experience a Boston University (BU) class would be much more diverse. In the Indian situation, over 90% would be engineers. In BU there would be not more than 20-30% engineers... So the richness of the discussion and the experience of students there was very high on account of two things—diversity in backgrounds and diversity in international origins. There is a classic case study I would teach on McDonald’s entering the former Soviet Union. Almost every time I’ve taught that case, there’s been one of my students who was born in the former East Block—Russia itself, or Poland, or former Czechoslovakia. They can talk about what it was to be brought up during the Soviet regime, what the conditions were like. One or two of the students would’ve actually visited that McDonald’s. We need that kind of diversity here. And more diversity in terms of having more women in the class.

Since the time you were a student at IIM, has the ratio of engineering students per class changed? Do you get applications from non-engineers?

I think on that diversity front, it has gone up and down. But if I compare from my time to now, it’s actually worse now. In my class at IIM-A, we had lots of engineers, but I don’t think it was anywhere close to 90%. We had many students who were from the social sciences, especially economics and they were very smart students. We actually had more diversity on that front. I think it’s time to bring it back up. We need more students from social sciences. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be going out and getting smart youngsters with a background in journalism or law to join us.

Is that something you will attempt to push for at IIM-B?

Absolutely. The way I look at that area is that we have to go and seek out these people.

See, one of the weaknesses in all the IIMs is that because of their reputation they have no problem filling their classroom with smart people. Which means they haven’t had to market themselves. But because of our admission criteria or because we don’t reach out to certain categories, some people don’t line up. Or they line up and we don’t take them. One part is the criteria, the other part is that some of them may not try. Which is a tragedy. So we have to take a look at the criteria. And secondly, we have to market ourselves. Like any healthy organization, we need to have a marketing function. I want to be actively involved in getting that marketing function up and running.

What are your other priorities? What’s your vision?

So, if you look ahead, the education sector is at an inflection point. There are some obvious things—there is an increasing demand for education. But the big change that has occurred already is that technology is creating enormous opportunities for delivery of education. Online education has always been there. But all along, people kind of looked down their nose on online education. But in 2011, Stanford opened up their course on Artificial Intelligence as a MOOC. There were about 160,000 students registered for that course across the world. And only 23,000 completed the course. But there were still 23,000 students who completed it. This was a big deal not because an online course was being offered, but because one of the world’s best institutions was putting its stamp of approval on online education. And then other universities began to wake up. This is a tremendous opportunity, but it’s also a threat. The opportunity is that any university in the world can beam its course around the world. People who couldn’t afford a world-class education, can afford it. The threat is that they can come into your market.

So, MOOCs will be one of the top priorities for IIM-B.

I would say technology will be one of the top priorities. We have to figure out how to go forward with and find a platform. We have to create the capabilities and that is the most difficult part. How do we get the faculty to get accustomed to the new format? Because someone who was effective in the old format may not be effective in the new format...So you can use technology and make the in-class experience much richer. There will be very few courses left that won’t have technology woven in. It’ll become natural. The world is changing at a very rapid rate and technology is a very disruptive change. You have to be very agile to take advantage of it. One of my priorities is going to be to examine the impact, figure out what IIM-B is doing and then implement a strategy.

Do you have any plans to encourage entrepreneurship and your incubation cell?

The entrepreneurship piece is part of a broader creation of value and social impact. We’re in probably the centre of innovation in India—innovations in terms of technology, business models and startups and so on. And so we have an obligation to focus on that in a bigger way in a very integrated fashion with the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Bangalore and the Karnataka area, and the country as a whole. Even before I joined, we started working on that.

How many quality engineers is the country actually producing, despite more than a million engineers graduating every year?

That is a big challenge. I think we have some 6 lakh engineering spots in colleges across India. Despite our desire to have more engineers, some years they are not fulfilled because the market has discovered that some of them don’t teach you anything...if you talk to the Infosys-es and the Nasscoms of the world, they will tell you about the crying need for training of engineers, who are supposed to have been done with their courses, but they have to be trained again. There are those kind of challenges too.

What plans do you have in terms of collaborating with other global institutions? Will you also look to add more foreign faculty.

We actually have a number of collaborations already. We will look at them carefully to see what they’re doing for us and what we’re doing for them. We’ll add new ones as we determine the need. They’ll be with top universities, so yes I’ll be doing that.

IIM-B has made a good beginning on (adding foreign faculty). One of the other things we want to do is give our students more exposure to international affairs, international business, different cultures and the best way to do that is to send them abroad. Right now 35-40% of our students go abroad, which is good but it’s nowhere close to where I want it to be. We want to get it up to 100%...we want to attract more foreign faculty and get them to come here, we want to get our faculty to travel abroad more, use our partnerships to do that, use presence in international conferences to do that. So, what we’ll do is we’ll pick a few regions of the world where we want to focus, try to create faculty expertise around that region, send our students to those countries, build research centres, etc. So it’ll be an integrated international strategy.

What are some of your immediate challenges?

I think one of the challenges has been in attracting enough foreign students. So we will be having a major thrust to actively sell our programmes outside India... the challenge for IIMs all across has been attracting enough high-quality foreign applicants. The ones we attract are high quality—we just can’t get enough of them. Part of it is that they don’t know about us. The other part is, say if you’re coming from China, then our placement services can’t help you much. It can help you upto a certain extent. So, we have to work on two or three different pieces to make sure that the value delivered to foreign students is much stronger.

You have joined at a time when India has a new government and the economy is going through a tough time. How do you see the economy impacting the upcoming placement season?

I think we had a great placement season this year. The phenomenon you talked about is true—if the economy is languishing, then placements are affected. But I think for the IIMs, especially the top ones, the placements are pretty good. So, we have no problem with that.

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Published: 04 Jul 2014, 10:25 PM IST
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