PRACTICAL TRAINING
Room With A View
Business schools are increasingly looking to churn out business-ready managers
BINU KWATRA
15 May 2009
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| REAL EXPOSURE: Students at Mumbai’s SPJIMR participate in a mock stockmarket trading session (Pic by Satheesh Nair) |
They were investors oblivious to the economic slowdown. Except that they were not real stockmarket players, only the audience — comprising business school students from across the country — at the annual entrepreneurship event, Lock Stock and Trade, at SP Jain Institute of Marketing and Research (SPJIMR). After mock trading in 18 stocks, each represented by a team of SPJIMR students, that lasted for about four hours, the one with the largest market capitalisation was declared the winner.
The companies in this simulated trading game, however, were not make-believe firms, but real first-generation businesses. SPJIMR students who opted for a course called Managing New Business Initiatives last year, helped these budding entrepreneurs translate their ideas into scalable businesses. “We work with TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) and ask them to suggest the names of the entrepreneurs,” says Suresh Rao, chairperson of Centre for Entrepreneurship at SPJIMR.
This Wharton-style entrepreneurship programme was started by the Mumbai-based business school in 2005. Even at the Wharton Small Business Development Center (SBDC), dozens of undergraduate students provide consultancy to venture capital-backed start-ups every year. B-schools in India are also increasingly realising the need for providing handson experiential learning to churn out business-ready managers. These pedagogical tools go beyond the summer internship and regular project work that have for long been part of management courses. “Each student should have several options on how to learn,” says M.L. Shrikant, dean of SPJIMR.
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But it isn’t as if the wisdom to expose students to real-life situations dawned on Bschool instructors recently. Way back in 1978 The Wharton School established the Global Consulting Practicum (GCP). This elective course is now also offered by the Indian School of Business (ISB), which has an academic alliance with Wharton that, according to the ISB’s website, “…has benefitted over 100 partner companies worldwide through sound recommendations which generated more than $400 million in incremental revenue”. Students from Wharton and ISB jointly help Indian companies enter the North American market or enhance their positions in that market. The ISB-Wharton GCP has Mahindra & Mahindra, Max India and Apollo Hospitals among others, as partners.
Socially Sensitive Too A group of students from Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur, opted out of placements this year to pursue an alternative career. They have formed Parichay, an organisation that markets artefacts made by artisans in rural areas. Another group is selling ox-driven generators with entries in their order-book swelling. The inspiration, of course, comes from the mandatory exposure to the rural sector at XLRI. “Students are given topics such as sanitation, health and they sometimes take part even in water-harvesting activities,” says Dean Pingali Venugopal.
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