SPJIMR Mumbai: We are World Class, but this has sometimes been a well kept secret: Dr R Banerjee, Dean

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MBAUniverse.com News Desk |
September 17, 2016
SPJIMR Mumbai Dean Dr Ranjan Banerjee who joined the B-school in June 2015 shares with MBAUniverse.com the key initiatives taken to improve curriculum, industry connect and student experience
We are world class on certain dimensions but the fact that we are world class is a well-kept secret Dr Ranjan Banerjee Dean SPJIMR

On the back of innovative pedagogy and deep industry connect, Mumbai based SPJIMR is one of the few B-schools that have successfully challenged the hegemony of IIMs and risen to the top of B-school rankings and reputation. However, in a fiercely competitive Indian B-school marketplace, where IIMs, ISB, XLRI and a few other elite institutions are competing for attracting the best student talent, SPJIMR needs to up the ante, and clarify its positioning.

That’s exactly what SPJIMR, led by their new Dean Dr Ranjan Banerjee, seems to be doing. Last month, SPJIMR launched its new brand identity, aimed to make the institution more vibrant, energetic and visible. Alongside, SPJIMR has taken many other initiatives aimed at improving curriculum, industry connect and student experience.

Dr Banerjee joined as Dean of SPJIMR in June 2015. He holds a B.Tech from IIT Bombay, an MBA from IIM Calcutta and a PhD in Management from the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, USA. He has worked for leading FMCG companies like Asian Paints, Vadilal and Hindustan Unilever. He has previously taught at IIM Calcutta, Singapore Management University, Carlson School of Management, USA, amongst others.

MBAUniverse.com spoke to Dr Banerjee to find out more about the initiatives taken in last 15 months at SPJIMR, background of new branding, and plans for coming months.

Edited excerpts from this MBAUniverse.com Interview follow:

Q: You took over as the Dean of SPJIMR in June 2015. How has the journey been...what are some of the key initiative taken in your leadership?
A: The journey has been memorable, enriching, rewarding. The support from faculty, students, staff and alumni has exceeded my expectations.

Key initiatives taken since I joined include emphasis on Faculty Development, focus on Research and Thought Leadership, Curricular Innovation, enhancing Placements, focus on Internationalization, Alumni and Industry integration, improving the infrastructure, and last but certainly not the least improving our Branding.

After a lot of thought, we have launched our new branding. We have also launched a 11 month program for women who want to return to full fledged corporate careers after an extended break. The program will incorporate multiple internships and has dedicated, high profile corporate partners. Preliminary feedback indicates excellent response.

Q: Tell us about your Faculty Development initiatives? Also, how are you driving Thought Leadership at SPJIMR?
A: Let me start with our emphasis on faculty development. We have recruited over 10 new faculty, and have a good mix of bright PHD researchers, and experienced and successful corporate executives within our new recruits. In addition, leading faculty from institutions like LBS, LSE, UT-Austin, Cornell, Carlson-Minnesota have taken research seminars for our faculty.

On research and thought leadership, we have brought in a new Research Head at SPJIMR. Internally, we conducted a workshop on thought leadership for our faculty. This is already beginning to show good results. We recently launched the SPJIMR blog, with over 25 faculty contributions. The blog has been extremely well received. They are available on http://www.spjimr.org/blog for anyone to read.

We will be launching our fellow program in management later this year. We have collaboration with the global leader in leadership research, the Center for Creative Leadership, around India centric research and executive education.

A structured plan to enhance volume and quality of case output is being executed. There is a tangible difference in case output, and we have developed many India centric cases.

We are partnering with HBP to take our faculty knowhow on 'teaching with simulations' to other business schools across the country. The first workshop is later this month.

Last year, we were selected by AACSB as one of the 30 most innovative business schools globally. We were the only Indian school to feature in this list.

So a lot is happening at SPJIMR on this front.

Q: What about the Curricular Innovation...what are the initiatives taken in this area?
A: In last year or so, we have taken many important steps to strengthen our curriculum. A core course on Design Thinking has now been introduced across all programs. The Design Thinking movement at SPJIMR was initiated by a workshop by Srikant Datar of HBS. We built on his material, created context specificity, and significantly deepened the insighting component. This has been extremely well appreciated by corporate India, and we are getting a lot of positive reaction from recruiters.

In the 2 year MBA program, we have increased the flexibility to switch specialisations after the first year, and offered minor specializations, so one could, for example, combine a marketing major with an analytics minor. This has been well received by students and recruiters alike.

We have further strengthened our much appreciated non classroom initiatives, and have deepened engagement and reflection across initiatives.

We offer an integrative experience to our students. Our students experience management problems in rural India through a social sector internship, mentor children in urban slums through our unique Abhyudaya program, undergo a unique course which combines Indian spirituality with modern neuroscience, intern with some of the best corporates in India, and execute projects in international environments through the global fast track. Thus, our students are equipped with multiple lenses to view the world, and this is not only valued by the corporate world, but is strong preparation for life beyond the campus.

To strengthen Faculty-student connect, we have introduced many events which bring faculty and students together. A faculty-student business quiz which was jointly compered by a faculty and staff member, a faculty student debate-both had mixed teams. On teacher's day, we have faculty and student performing songs and dance performances together. The depth of the student teacher relationship has gone up, and we feel this is crucial to the quality of the learning process.

Q: Industry engagement and Placements have been a strength of SPJIMR. How are you planning to further enhance this area?
A: We have strengthened our placement team, improved process quality, and as a consequence, internship placements have improved significantly in our two year program. Finance placement has improved perceptibly, the combination of location and dynamism suggests that we will improve outcomes for finance students much faster than the market. Traditional sectors like FMCG have seen new, high profile recruiters. This year, we had international internships with prestigious Fortune 500 companies.

Our alumni engagement has gone up and I have personally been a part of alumni meets across the world. Locations include London, Singapore, San Francisco, Melbourne, Reutlingen, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore etc. We have shared our vision with the alumni and invited feedback. We see alumni as our bridge to industry and many things have happened consequently including ‘Sparc’, a short talk event which was around the confluence of business and social sensitivity and brought the community together. We had high impact talks from faculty, students, staff, alumni and celebrated keynote speakers like Shaheen Mistri and R Gopalakrishnan. We have started Alumni webinars whereby celebrated alumni share their business and industry insights with the SPJIMR community.

A pleasant consequence of the deeper alumni and community engagement was the #Iamspjimr campaign in 2015 wherein alumni, students, staff and faculty took to social media to share ways in which the institute has touched their lives on the occasion of Teacher’s Day. The campaign trended number 1 on twitter nationally.

We have deepened industry interaction, and have gone to industry not with a menu card approach, but with an approach to understand, listen and co-create. Fresh case studies, a co-created MDP to build the women leadership pipeline at Mahindra, industry partnered courses have all grown as a consequence. We have industry advisory councils for each area which are active, and help us review and update coursework periodically.

Q: What are some of the initiatives taken to make SPJIMR better known globally?
A: Yes, we have taken many initiatives in the Internationalization area. Our faculty have been invited speakers at prestigious international conferences and have taught courses at international business schools. So our visibility and presence in important interactions and forums has gone up manifold.

I was asked to conduct a workshop on change management for deans and associate deans of US business schools at the GMAC conference in Florida. Not only was the workshop well received, but it was also probably an unusual instance of an Indian b-school leader being given this recognition.

All our full time course students do a month of advanced specialization courses at top universities in the US like Cornell, CMU. A student project guided by our faculty won the best project prize in the Global Network of Microeconomics of Competitiveness, and one of our senior faculty received the prize from Michael Porter at HBS.

Q: Recently SPJIMR launched a new brand identity, which only has letters ‘SPJIMR’ and a few rays in orange, rising upwards. What was the need for it?
A: There are three or four consistent things about SPJIMR and I saw this as I came into the institute, which is one of the top five management education institutions…and incidentally it is not just me but there are a lot of other people who are saying this as well: the student quality is (and I can tell you this because I have taught at the other institutes) clearly comparable to an IIM - A, B or C; not significantly better, not significantly worse. Our students can walk into those and do well. So the student quality is clearly at the higher end of the spectrum. If you walk in and meet the faculty, our faculty in terms of dynamism, openness to learning, teaching ability and currency of knowledge of business are very competitive.

However, if you looked at the frontage of the institute, if you looked at the branding, if you looked at the level of engagement with the world outside – we were not doing justice to our standing, our stature and the quality and depth of our work and our achievements.

Now, one can argue that an institute which is authentic and is doing good work just needs to do good work and perceptions will follow, but we are living in a world where a lot of people are communicating better than us. We also have a brand confusion issue and there is a lot of money that is being spent by other interested parties and therefore we must engage in this more fully and deliberately.

Also, you have to understand that when students come in and join institutions, perceptions play a role and therefore there was this strong belief (and this was confirmed by research) that our brand perception lagged our brand reality. At the extreme, I have gone and made a statement to the effect that we are world class on certain dimensions but the fact that we are world class is a well-kept secret.

All this prompted us to rethink our branding.

Q: OK, so how did you execute the new branding? Education-branding requires a very different approach than say an FMCG branding...
A: So we surveyed students, we surveyed recruiters, we surveyed the alumni and the needs that came across were consistent. We needed to present ourselves better. In the process, we asked that if you have to personify the SPJIMR brand, who would it be, and then surprisingly, it came independently (from multiple quarters and different stakeholders), that there is this character called Phunsukh Wangdu in the movie ‘Three Idiots’, who resonated with the attributes of the SPJIMR brand.

So the point is that we had the hypothesis that our branding is not doing justice to who we are, we researched it with multiple stakeholders and we found out that there was a gap. We also found out that some dimensions of the institution were reflected in the way we are projecting ourselves; attributes like “grounded” and “authentic” were coming through but “innovative” and “dynamic” were not.

I think the larger problem with the branding was maybe when we are projecting ourselves, people saw us as being a little traditional, non-contemporary, not dynamic, not innovative, all of which is very untrue. It was not only we who saw the mismatch, many of our stakeholders were unhappy that we were not doing something about it. So that is why we moved the needle on the brand and we did it once we had a certain alignment but also after there were certain things we had done fundamentally in terms of the institution, and after first we worked on strengthening the core.

So if you ask the reasons for the re-branding exercise, I think the answer would be two or three fold: One, we need our branding to be consistent with our institution, that we want to build not only our branding but all our communications.

Second is that one of our strengths -- that we are a constituent of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and the values we have at the core are for us a differentiator -- we were not reflecting that well enough, and we find that in the new brand presence, the association with BVB is far clearer. There is only one institute called SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) which has been around for 35 years and is supported by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, an institution of national eminence recognised by the Government Of India.

In our new branding, the five spokes represent our five key attributes, consistent with both stakeholder perceptions and reality: Grounded, authentic, innovative, dynamic and socially sensitive. It was felt that innovative and dynamic were not reflected strongly in our earlier branding.

Third is that the colours that we are now using are more vibrant; they represent the emotion and the larger piece is that I think it resonates with the millennials, it resonates with the students of tomorrow: I think the way the community, particularly the alumni and the students have received the new identity is one of the biggest validations and makes me think and say that the branding exercise has already been extremely well received.

Research indicates that millennials want both profit and purpose, and that is a hallmark of S P Jain Institute and Research (SPJIMR), and that is reflected in our line of SPJIMR. We are an institute which creates an environment which actively encourages people to find the courage and heart to discover and be who they truly are.

On the faculty side, we will have the courage to think independently, and create knowledge for the betterment of India as a whole-both India and Bharat. So courage and heart and thought leadership are implicitly linked.

Q: So now that the new branding is in place, how do you plan to make it work on the ground... 
A: Of course, the point is that ours is an education brand, and an education brand is a service brand. If you are looking at a service brand and if a service brand has a set of values, then the larger part of branding is not just in the logo or in the colours and in the consistency, but that all our processes and all our interactions must be geared to reflect the brand. So there is a fair amount of training and re-training required around the contact points.

Does our reception reflect the values of the brand? Does the way that we respond to enquiries reflect the values of the brand? Equally important, and this is work in progress, and we have some movement as seen in the recent expansion of our mess facilities, but does our infrastructure represent the values of the brand? Is our infrastructure easy to use? Are we user friendly as an institution?

I think what we are seeing is early steps. We really have to reinvent the core of our service to be student friendly, to have a far better integration between faculty and staff, and all those are equally important attributes because if we change just the manifestations of the brand without changing the core, it won’t stick in as a service brand. After all, the largest part of the service brand is the experience.

So there are elements we have to strengthen in the total experience. We also have to strengthen what is already there. So if teaching excellence is our strength, how do we take teaching experience to even higher levels? This is tied to a sharper focus on consulting, a sharper focus on industry interface, on research and on teaching. We don’t see these as divergent activities. To teach well, you will have to be current with practice and theory. As you teach well and are current with practice and theory and you consult, your practice and theory get continually updated.  So we see teaching, consulting, research, and thought leadership as synergistic aspects of the role of the faculty.

So what we are really trying to do is expand the way we look at excellence and then the sustained excellence means that our faculty will emerge as leaders not only in terms of pedagogy, which has always been our strength, but now also in terms of thought leadership and content leadership, which may not always have been our strength.

Tangible evidence of our emerging identity include the SPJIMR blog, with over 25 high quality faculty contributions on SPJIMR Blogs, a recent, student created SPJIMR song and an upgradation of the campus look and feel.

The entry to the institute has been landscaped and there is a visible improvement in infrastructure. We have expanded the student mess. A significant extension to classroom and office capacity is a year away from completion. A behavioural lab, a simulation lab and a design thinking lab will be added. A long term plan to upgrade existing hostel rooms, build a new student hostel and faculty accommodation is under way. Reliable campus healthcare support has been provided through HealthSpring.

Q: Finally, having taken many significant initiatives in last 15 months, what are your next priorities?
A: I have clear goals and priorities on my mind for the short term and the medium term.

My short term priorities are:

-- Improving Infrastructure and student living experience.

-- Strengthen faculty recruitment, development and thought leadership.

-- Make a success of the women's leadership program.

-- Create a unique, world class fellow program in management that will be innovative and leverage our unique strengths.

-- Create a 'best in class' work environment for faculty, students and staff to acquire, create and disseminate knowledge

My medium term priorities are:

-- Launch advanced management programs in collaboration with top international universities, both for general management and family managed business.

-- Continually Innovate so that our curriculum continues to be  both current and futuristic.

-- Create a strategic plan around technology enabled learning

-- Consolidate processes so we are known as the institute with the best  faculty student connect in the country

-- Continue to enhance our leading position in industry integration and placement.

 So we will see a lot of action from SPJIMR in coming months!

Stay tuned to MBAUniverse.com for more updates on SPJIMR