Ahead Of The Curve

To cater to the business needs of the new-age manager, B-schools are busy experimenting with a mix of offerings other than just adding electives.

- E. Kumar Sharma

The new age business leaders expect a lot more from a business school than learning how to diagnose and solve business problems. For they know that the key to building sustainable and valuable companies in the 21st century is understanding the new and evolving technologies. For this, B-schools, especially the leading ones, are working on offerings that go beyond the traditional route of adding more elective courses.

While some are coming up with niche programmes that meet today’s needs, others are following a newer suite of case studies and bringing faculty learning from industry consulting engagements into the classroom. A typical business school curriculum has core subjects such as finance, marketing and strategy, and electives that are added, changed or deleted based on demand.

“The core courses are fundamental and have long-term value. It is electives that prepare students keeping in view the changing environment,” says IIM Bangalore (IIM-B) Director G. Raghuram. In the context of Industry 4.0, he says, “We have a lot more electives and keep adding as per the context.”

“New elective courses can come in any time while the core and compulsory courses, reviewed once every three years, have stood the test of time and are not going to go away. The electives are more contemporary. Some of the new courses that have come in over the last couple of years include data visualisation – where you take data and put it into formats to see trends that help in decision-making,” says IIM-A Director Errol D’Souza. Then, there are courses around digital marketing and electives on communication, social theatre (use of theatre for social purposes as a form of communication that organisations can use to interact with stakeholders) and media.

Too Many Electives