IMC Awards for Excellence in Management Education 2026: Great Lakes Gurgaon Wins Gold, TAPMI Silver, BIM Trichy Bronze

First instituted in 2013, the IMC Awards for Excellence in Management Education are widely regarded as the most prestigious peer recognition in Indian management education. Two features set them apart. First, they are decided by an independent jury of eminent academic leaders. Second, they are a not-for-profit initiative: no registration, submission or participation fee is charged at any stage. Recognition rests purely on the merit of the initiative and the strength of the evidence behind it.

IMC Awards 2026 Winners
This year’s theme reflects a wider reality confronting business schools. Generative AI has moved from novelty to infrastructure in under three years, and academic leaders are now grappling with fundamental questions about how to redesign curricula, pedagogy and assessment so that AI augments rigour rather than eroding it. The IMC Awards were conceived precisely to identify, document and recognise the best of what Indian institutions are doing in response, and to make that practice available to the wider community of management educators in India.
For the IMC Awards 2026, twelve finalist institutions were shortlisted from more than thirty initiatives nominated by business schools across the country. Each finalist documented a distinct approach to embedding AI in the classroom, which covered from redesigning assessment and rebuilding entire programme architectures to running live, paid consultancy engagements inside the MBA. 

IMC 2026 Award Winners are

Together, the three winning initiatives illustrate a shift now underway across Indian management education: away from teaching students merely to operate AI tools, and towards developing the judgement, verification and accountability that AI cannot supply on its own.

Congratulating the Winners, Dr Amit Agnihotri, Founder & Chair, Indian Management Conclave (IMC), “The IMC Awards recognise excellence in management education through a rigorous, jury-led process grounded in merit. I congratulate all the deserving winners and express my sincere appreciation to the distinguished Jury for its valuable contribution. IMC Publications will shortly bring out a volume documenting these leading national initiatives in AI in Management Education, to share their insights with the wider management education community.”

IMC Awards 2026 Jury
The IMC Awards 2026 were adjudicated by a jury of distinguished academic leaders, chaired by Dr Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur, Stanford University and IIM Ahmedabad, Dr Krishnan is among India’s foremost scholars of innovation management and has led two Indian Institutes of Management — Indore and Bangalore — as Director. 

Presenting the Awards at the IMC 2026 Valedictory Ceremony, Dr Rishikesha T. Krishnan said: “Leveraging AI in Management Education requires a deep understanding of both the technology and MBA curriculum and pedagogy. I am pleased to see the strong work being undertaken by Indian B-schools, recognised through the IMC Awards. I congratulate the three winners and all nine finalists.” He further added: “I have been associated with the IMC Conclave and IMC Awards for over a decade, and I congratulate Dr Amit Agnihotri for his sustained and unparalleled contribution to strengthening management education in India.”

He was joined on the jury by Dr Varun Nagaraj, Dean and Professor of Information Management and Analytics at the S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai. Before entering academia in 2021, Dr Nagaraj held C-level roles across venture-funded start-ups and public companies in the United States, driving product innovation in networking, data-centre computing, IoT and AI. 

IMC Awards 2026 Gold Winner: Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon
Initiative: “AI for Judgement” 
Presented by Dr Raj Krishnan Shankar, Director, and Dr Poornima Gupta, Program Director–PGDM.
The IMC 2026 Gold Award went to Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon for AI for Judgement, an institution-wide effort to rethink what students are asked to learn now that generative AI can produce a polished answer in seconds. Rather than adding another AI elective or relying on detection tools, Great Lakes redesigned learning and assessment around three stages: Decide, Build and Defend. Students first take and defend a managerial decision before receiving a framework; they then build something with AI (a model, tool, agent or prototype); and finally they defend their work, through individual vivas that make individual understanding visible even in group settings. The approach now runs across Strategy, Accounting, Operations, Finance, Machine Learning, Organisational Behaviour, Research Methods and Consumer Behaviour, supported by responsible-AI governance and a purpose-built Socratic Viva Agent.
According to the IMC Awards Jury, what distinguished the initiative was the depth of faculty engagement behind it. A four-week generative-AI programme was completed by 100% of faculty, with more than 15 faculty members now embedding AI across six disciplines. Early evidence includes a voluntary Student AI Mini Hackathon that drew 26 submissions and nine shortlisted teams, working student-built AI solutions, and a marked rise in student questioning and participation. 

IMC Awards 2026 Silver Winner: T A Pai Management Institute, Manipal
Initiative: “From AI User to Accountable Manager”  
Presented by Dr Kartikeya Bolar, Professor, Information Systems and Analytics.
The IMC Silver Award recognised T A Pai Management Institute (TAPMI), Manipal for an initiative that makes accountability, not just fluency, the outcome of AI education. At its heart is Learning through AI, a core MBA course in which students treat generative AI as a fallible collaborator rather than an answer engine. Across eight browser-based, human-in-the-loop “desks”, students verify claims against sources, adapt prompts for different audiences, audit AI-generated audio, recover blind spots, red-team a recommendation, restore authentic managerial voice and deconstruct a case — before signing off, in their own name, on a deliberately flawed report they must first find and correct. That signature is the pedagogical point: AI may draft, but a human remains answerable. The same discipline extends into six further self-contained environments spanning statistics, analytics, visualisation, research methods, an interactive case film and a business simulation.

A notable feature of this initiative is its portability. Every environment is written as self-contained HTML that runs on any ordinary laptop with no server, licence or installation — which is precisely why the model can be handed to other institutions. Formal Term I feedback provided the first evidence base: an overall rating of 9.40 out of 10 across 116 respondents in two MBA sections.

IMC Awards 2026 Bronze Winner: Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Tiruchirappalli
Initiative: “The AI-to-Industry Continuum”  
Presented by Dr Asit K. Barma, Director & Professor, and Dr Sridevi Tandley, Assistant Professor and Chair, Centre for Industrial Consultancy.
The IMC Bronze award went to Bharathidasan Institute of Management (BIM), Tiruchirappalli for The AI-to-Industry Continuum, built on a single, striking idea: the MBA curriculum in AI should not end with an examination: it should end with a paying client. BIM pairs a curricular ladder of nineteen sequenced courses (about thirty-eight credits), running from a common analytical foundation to enterprise architecture and generative AI, with live, paid consultancy engagements that corporates commission through its Centre for Industrial Consultancy. Faculty members lead every project and student teams deliver the work; the contracted value stands at ₹1.12 crore across clients in five countries, with several proof-of-concept clients choosing to commission further work.

According to the Jury, the submission stood out for both its rigour and its candour, carefully distinguishing measured impact from design maturity. Governance is taught inside the technical courses as an engineering constraint rather than as a separate ethics module, and the same capability is now being turned inward through Sūtradhāra, a governance-first agentic AI framework for the student lifecycle. 

IMC Awards 2026 Finalists
Beyond the three winners, nine further institutions were recognised as finalists of the IMC Awards 2026. Together they map the range of what Indian business schools are attempting with AI: from programme-level “operating systems” and mandatory certification models to institution-wide GPT ecosystems and assessment-integrity frameworks.

(All names in alphabetic order)

Several finalist initiatives point to distinct models other schools may recognise. Institute of Management Technology, Hyderabad has made a minimum of two industry-recognised AI certifications a condition for course completion under its PraxiEdge™ framework, which weights “knowing” and “doing” equally at 50–50. Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence has bound a five-level AI Assessment Scale to its academic-integrity policy, so that every assessment declares how AI may legitimately be used. Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development, Pune has built an institution-wide ecosystem of more than thirty subject and functional GPTs, while Fortune Institute of International Business has rebuilt the architecture beneath its PGDM as an “educational operating system.” Chitkara Business School offers an MBA in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in knowledge partnership with EY India, and NMIMS Mumbai, MDI Murshidabad, RV Institute of Management and RV University each contribute further curriculum- and competency-led approaches to embedding AI across the management syllabus.

The IMC Awards 2026 Book
The Award Winners and the nine finalist initiatives are documented in full in the official Awards compendium, IMC Awards for Excellence in Management Education 2026 — Best National Initiatives on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Edited by Dr Amit Agnihotri under IMC Publication Series (First Edition, 2026; ISBN 978-81-180024-2-0), the volume reproduces each initiative as submitted by the nominating institution, alongside the jury profiles and a framing essay on leveraging AI for curriculum and pedagogical innovation. For deans, directors and faculty, it is intended as a practical reference, a curated record of tested practice that other institutions can study, adapt and build upon. Institutions wishing to order copies of the book may write to [email protected].

The IMC Awards 2026 arrive at a defining moment for management education. As generative AI moves from novelty to infrastructure, the questions of how to redesign curricula, pedagogy and assessment to preserve and advance student learning are no longer optional. They are central to the credibility of the MBA itself. The initiatives recognised this year show that Indian business schools are not on the side-lines of this shift; they are actively shaping it. The Indian Management Conclave congratulate Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon, T A Pai Management Institute, Manipal, and Bharathidasan Institute of Management, Tiruchirappalli, together with all finalists, for their leadership and look forward to the community carrying the conversation into the broader theme of AI in teaching, learning and research in management education.

Read key highlights of IMC 2026, only on MBAUniverse.com, India’s no 1 MBA portal: 

• Management Education Must Be Reimagined for the Age of AI: Chief Economic Advisor Dr V. Anantha Nageswaran Exhorts Deans at IMC 2026
• Policy Makers, AI Experts, Academic Leaders and 200+ Scholars to deliberate on MBA Education in Age of AI at 16th Indian Management Conclave (IMC) 2026 on Sept 18-19 at IIM Lucknow Noida
• IMC Research Conference (IMC-IRC) 2026 Gains Momentum; Over 250 Scholars Register, Abstract Submission Deadline Extended