An Extraordinary Opportunity for Leading Indian Management Schools in MBA programs

Abstract

The dramatic increase in fine grained digital data is pervading functions in organizations that range from from finance and marketing to human relations and supply chain operations. At the highest strategic level it is disrupting entire industries in transportation, media, entertainment, engineering, merchandising, retail banking and financial services. This represents an extraordinary opportunity for schools like IIMA to develop an MBA program that produces exceptionally strong quantitatively oriented graduates. With 90% of incoming students having engineering degrees, IIMA can have a strong concentration option in business analytics. Few business schools in the west have incoming classes with such a strong foundation in quantitative thinking. The IT solutions industry in India is a global leader and provides an excellent environment for building such a program. One of the industries that the digital revolution is likely to disrupt in the next decade is the education industry. This presents another extraordinary opportunity for IIMA to use on-line learning technologies to directly support MBA programs that have limited resources to build strong business analytics components in their offerings.

I see two significant challenges. First is that engineering education in India is weak in providing knowledge of statistics which is a key component of business analytics. The second is the need for a rapid ramp up in developing this concentration to stay at the forefront of the rapidly evolving digital economy. My experience with teaching business analytics at MIT and with founding a company that supports on-line learning of statistics with over 100 courses developed by authors of recognized text books in a range of topics, combined with dialogue over the past year with education institutes in India leads me to propose a collaborative initiative. This effort would involve education institutions pooling their resources to build concentration programs in business analytics that leverage these new disruptive educational technologies.