Dr. Prakash Apte, director, IIM Bangalore, addressing a press conference said, “IIM Bangalore is the first post-graduate management institution in India to partner with Stanford Business School in an academic program within its MBA curriculum." As part of the tie-up, Stanford students will come to IIM-B for a period of one week during September 16-22, 2007, and IIM students will visit Stanford for a week during December 2-8, 2007. The program will start in the next academic year with 16 graduate business students from each institution. Later, it will expand to accommodate 20 students each.
In a similar move, IIM Ahmedabad has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Columbia Business School. According to sources at IIM A, Columbia B-school dean Glenn Hubbard will visiting India later this month when the partnership between the two B-schools is formalized. While the IIM A officials confirmed the proposed tie-up with Columbia, they did not comment on the nature of the tie-up. Columbia Business School is among the top ten (according to Business Week’s 2006 rankings) B-schools in the world. For Columbia, a tie-up with IIM-A could mean the ability to build up a research base and conduct more case studies.
The tie-up will help students to get global exposure in terms of research and study, as well as global placements. These initiatives will facilitate a unique cross-cultural learning of business and management in the US and India, said V "Seenu" Srinivasan, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School and one of the architects of the program.
These tie-ups are part of the IIMs’ global branding exercise. As reported earlier on this management portal, the stakeholders of India’s premier B-schools are keen to build ‘IIMs’ as a Global Brand. Tie-ups and associations with leading B-schools of the world is one of the strategies being perused.
