Creating 'innovators with conscience'

The SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai, has been the top Indian institution in the Financial Times' (FT) Masters in Management rankings for two years in a row. Varun Nagaraj, dean of SPJIMR, spoke to Atul Krishna about what the institute does differently, its plans, the future of business education, and the FT and National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) lists. Edited excerpts below

- Atul Krishna

Q. You have done well in FT rankings but not so much in NIRF rankings. Why do you think that is?

A. Each ranking emphasises on different things and that's why different rankings will result in different outcomes. In the case of FT rankings, the focus is very much on the acceleration that the incoming MBA student gets as they exit the programme. There are other questions, of course, but that is the dominant driver. On that outcome, we seem to be outperforming our peers.

Now, NIRF has a different set of criteria. If you look at the one metric that swings the NIRF ranking, it basically is a 24% weightage on research. On all the other criteria, the various universities and schools are bunched closely together. Out of the five subdimensions of NIRF, we tend to be in the top five in three of them. The two criteria that we are behind is in research and peer perception - which is very opaque and nobody has any idea how that is calculated.

In research, everybody knows what they're measuring but we all have different opinions on whether they are measuring the right things.

Q. Why do you have a low score in research?

A. Because I think they're measuring the wrong things and I don't agree with what they're measuring. They're measuring two things-quantity and quality. In case of quantity, they're essentially measuring the SCOPUS score, looking at what these faculty have published on the SCOPUS database.

And that's a quantity measure; there is no difference between a high-quality journal and a low-quality journal. It is simply how many SCOPUS journals are indexed. So, if you want to play a low-quality SCOPUS game, it's a very easy one to play. There are 20,000 academic journals in the world and about 15,000 of them are quite useless. And it's very easy to publish in these. Nobody reads them and it doesn't really matter.