B-Schools need to reinvent: Kishore Biyani

Add Review

MBAUniverse.com News Desk |
July 24, 2016
Indian management institutes need to innovate to become relevant in the fast changing business world. That's the strong message sent out by one of the fastest growing entrepreneur Mr Kishore Biyani, CEO & Founder of the Future Group.

Addressing the AIMS Management Convention on Day 2, Mr Biyani said, "B-Schools were first established about 100 years back in the industrialization era. Today services dominate the markets. B-schools need to innovate on their curriculum and teaching methodology." He added, "In the Indian context, what they are teaching is not very relevant in the changing business dynamics in India, where youth dominate the market composition and their aspirations are changing very fast." 

The Day 2 of the AIMS Annual Management Education Convention become with a panel discussion featuring Mr Biyani and other experts including Dr. Sten Ekman, Research Director - Malardalen University, Sweden; Dr. Banny Banerjee, Director - Stanford Design Program, Stanford, USA; Prof. Dr. Uday Salunkhe, Director – Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research and Dr M R Rao, Dean, ISB. The panel was moderated by Mr Suresh Venkat of CNBC TV 18. The topic of the panel discussion was 'The Innovation Imperative - Expectation from the B-Schools'. 

Commenting on the need shun the past thinking, Mr Biyani said: "B-Schools need to encourage new ideas and thinking. Instead of Case-method, which looks at the past, we must encourage Scenario-planning approaches which simulate the future."  

Highlighting the uniqueness of the Indian consumers, and the need for finding indigenous solutions, Mr Biyani said, "Given our culture and caste system, we can not read Paco Underhill (renowned retail guru, and author of 'Why we buy') and just implement in the Indian retail environment. It will fail. We need to develop an Indian solution to Indian needs." 

Commenting on the theme of the panel discussion, Mr Uday Salunkhe said, "We at Welingkar have embraced change. We have learnt from progressive Indian corporates like ICICI, Future Group, Tata Motors, Bharti Telecom and also from MNCs like Google. We have adopted multi-disciplinary approach to curriculum design. These steps have brought us closer to business & societal trends."      

Complimenting Welingkar for adopting new trends in management thinking, Mr Biyani said, "We interact with a lot of B-Schools. When we wanted to share and shape management thinking with our learnings, we found Welingkar to be the only school that was seriously ready to collaborate."