School of Management and Entrepreneurship and MBA (Tech) Programme
M. P. Gupta
News and ViewsIIT Jodhpur has several advantages while venturing into management education. Competency on diverse technology disciplines, a most sought after UG programs around STEM, increasing faculty size, a vibrant research culture, a strong doctoral program – all with a globally respectable brand. IIT Jodhpur is venturing into management education with a proposition to inculcate all the above qualities via various programs – regular MBA, Tech-MBA, executive programs, leadership programs, international programs and doctoral program. These are being conceived under a new School of Management & Entrepreneurship. The school is going to offer several programs for aspiring entrepreneurs and guide them through incubation and further commercialization. It is positioned to feed the state of Rajasthan in designing policies, projects and capacity building. With such a clarity and focus, IITJ is comparable to MIT and Sloan School of Management within MIT premises which have co-existed for a long time and have been guiding the entire world via high quality research and also producing deserving business leaders. There is no similar example in India so far.
Tech MBA
As we see business and industry around the world has been facing a challenging situation due to on-going havoc created by Covid-19, which is not only sudden but also unique. These are unlike situations where business continuity solutions are tested enough to respond quickly. The full impact of the COVID-19 situation is unfolding gradually every day. Given its uniqueness, many businesses were not fully prepared to handle the situation. For academic institutions, challenge lies into developing new content and format of programs that help organization deal with situation like these. Tech-MBA is the most relevant and possibly the best thought-out program to create technology leadership capability to ferry the organization out of this crisis. It is a rigorous journey of intense learning about the skills, technologies, applications and practices for the exploration and investigation of existing data assets to gain insight and not only drive business planning but ensure 'Business Continuity'.
Emerging Industry 4.0 organizations are about an ecosystem of real-time enterprises in its entirety. This depicts a scenario characterized by real time data flooded from multiple sources viz. banking, financial services, telecom, manufacturing and retail cutting across multiple functional areas. The nature of jobs will be dominantly around:
- Technology Consulting
- Product Management
- Emerging Technology Sales and Business Development
- Strategy portfolios around Economics of Digital Platforms
- Big Data and Business Intelligence
- Business Continuity
These jobs require professionals ready with skill to be able to leverage inputs from multiple cross-functional disciplines for implementation of advanced computational and mathematical models integrated with business rules from different functional areas of management. Technology leadership with emerging technologies (ICT Product, IoT, Big Data, Data science, Block chain, Cyber security & Real-time Business continuity) will never be possible with a conventional MBA. Developing professionals for these roles is one of the major premises that make Tech MBA highly relevant and yet different from conventional MBA. It is not only a novelty but also a need of the hour, and is going to be more pervasive than one can visualize, particularly in the aftermath of the ongoing pandemic triggered by Covid-19.
A Tech-inspired Curriculum
The Tech MBA reflects the growing demand for business leaders who can upskill and also be digital leaders where they apply their tech expertise within a business context. Tech MBA is still an MBA with a general management perspective, but a general management perspective for tech and tech-centric related companies. Tech-MBA focuses on digital finance, data analytics and AI, as well as digital transformation. It is a wholesome package created for students who are also going to study business strategy, in addition, they will be analyzing the corporate strategy of top tech companies, like Amazon, Google, and other tech-centric companies, such as start-ups which are considered digital masters. They will study economics but there’s going to be a strong emphasis on the digital economy. Operations are going to still focus on supply chain but with a focus on e-commerce companies. We are revolutionizing the way logistics and supply chain are managed and taught.
Admission and Induction
Admissions to this program was based on the CAT 2019 score, followed by a personal Interview. In the 3 months of rigorous process, we offered 319 candidates that yielded a batch of 76 brilliant participants. Diversity of this batch is going to be a key enabler in the learning process. More than 25% of the participants are female. The batch has PAN-India representation—we have participants from as far as Mizoram in North—east to Kerala in the Sothern part of India. Close to 2/3rd of the batch bring variety of professional experience to complement the classroom learning and enable a better theory-practice connect in the classroom.
The first batch was inaugurated on 27th July 2020 by the Director, IIT Jodhpur. The Chief Guest for the event was Mr. Ashwani Lohani (Former Chief of Air India and Indian Railways). The inauguration followed one week of enriching induction program designed to orient candidates to the various aspects that would be crucial for their next 2 years of rigorous program at SME, and further in their career.
Corporate Relations Centre
Corporate Relations Centre (CRC) at School of Management and Entrepreneurship (SME), Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur is responsible for the development of collaboration with the business environment. The Centre aims to promote and facilitate larger IITJ-Industry Collaboration between business and Industry through strategic partnerships. We intend to help companies, academic staff and students on collaboration by providing right talent, sharing information on industry trends, best practices through management development programs (MDPs), live industry projects, and collaboration methods and models in research and learning.
An underlying theme of this program is to enhance perception of Corporates about existence and capability of SME MBA students. To achieve this, one will need to mobilize multiple levers, covering major facets of this perception enhancement initiative, and then convert it into a reality. Foremost, we need to focus on the value creation. Here, we highlight existing value levers, enhance certain components and meticulously create media opportunities highlighting this delta.
- Placements
- Corporate Connect
- Startup SME (Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
- Skill Development, and
- Live Projects and Consultancy
At SME, IIT Jodhpur (OR SMEJ), our priority is to ensure that relevance meets rigor across all functional areas. Students have many opportunities for engagement with industry and thought leaders throughout the year. These interactions will not be limited to internships and industry talks. In addition, we intend to organize and moderate leadership talk series, industry summits, and business conclaves in order to bring in experts, thinkers, policy makers, practitioners from all spheres of academic and industry across the globe.
Management Development Programs
With the available resources in the form of faculty talent, campus infrastructure, and access to state of the art technology, SME is equipped to offer short term and long term LT for top-level and mid-level managers. Also, the school envisions to roll-out Exed programmes to address the concerns of young managers in the organisations.
Decision-makers at the top and mid-management level face a distinctive set of leadership challenges daily. Their decisions may have everlasting implications on the organisation and its people. Therefore, decision-makers need to be well-informed about the newer developments in the ever-evolving business world. Business schools such as SME has a responsibility to respond to the corporate world at large with its cutting edge insights through more in-depth case studies and research analysis. Our LT (Leadership Training), OLeT (Online Leadership & executive Training), and Exed programmes provide the managers with tools and insights to think strategically.
When it comes to pedagogy of LT, OLeT, and Exed, academic may have to move beyond traditional lecture methods and adopt case and activity-based learning methods. Why the case study approach? One of the critical reasons is that case studies bring new field-based perspective on real managerial and entrepreneurial concerns. It not only provides with a manner in which a company or an entrepreneur handled a specific situation, but also offers a possible alternative that could have been adopted to solve the same problem. Moreover, the case approach eliminates a monotony in learning in a classroom. Instead, the case method makes learning a two-way process. Participants engage in an active learning mode by debating and discussing the case problem. Multiplicity in viewing a case problem may open up new avenues to solve similar business challenges in other industry segments.
International Relationships
One important aspect of preparing future Tech MBA is providing adequate international exposures so that they are ready to the lead to world going to be defined with a blurred geographical boundary. With this in consideration, SME has brought internationalization in three forms—Global immersion, Semester Exchange, Dual Degree, International Faculty, and Global Accreditation. All the participants are required to go for two weeks of mandatory global field visit at the end of first year as part of Global immersion program. The institute has forged collaboration with the several leading instituted abroad where the participants can go for one-semester exchange or purse entire second-year to a dual degree. A greater chunk of classes in the SME will be delivered in collaboration with the faculty from the leading global universities. Further, as earning the reputed global accreditation is one important way to be recognized on an international platform, right from the day 1, SME is committed to achieve the three most coveted B-School accreditations (AMBA, EQUIS, AACSB).
IIT Jodhpur Offering
It is certain that organizations of the future would exist on the digital landscape. Real-time systems are going to surround most of our existence with real-time data enabling real-time decisions and actions. Today innovation is differentiating leading companies and will continue to do so – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft etc. An MBA graduate in such a dynamic business environment would require serving not only as a typical analyst but also as a strategist. Innovation management, Product management and Program management will be more dominant than the roles around business analysis which is, of course, overshadowing today. Taking a long-term view, Tech-MBA of IIT Jodhpur is visualised as an MBA for future organizations; an MBA best suited to tech companies where, apart from tech essentials, tech strategy related coverage will be significant. Therefore, a typical ‘Human Resources Management’ course is replaced by ‘Managing Human Capital’; ‘Leadership’ by ‘Technology Leadership’; and ‘Economy’ with ‘Digital Economy’. Few new courses may be ‘Working practices in the digital age’, ‘Digital platform innovation’, and ‘Digital transformation of government’-to name few.
There will be high international exposure i.e. teaching by international faculty, immersion & exchange programs, dual degree options and adopting experiential learning pedagogy. In global immersion, students will be required to spend a few weeks at a place oversees (School/Workplace abroad) for gaining additional exposure to the global workplace. Exchange Program will allow students to spend a semester at international B-Schools of repute. Opportunity to Earn a Dual and Joint Degree - there would be multiple options to the candidates - regular MBA, Tech-MBA, modular MBA, and International MBA (Joint Degree and Dual Degree) all of which would be aimed toward building socially responsible corporate leaders.
