Are business schools in India tailored to producing management executives or business entrepreneurs? Is it possible to produce both? Does a B-School need a separate set of skills for each? And are they capable of doing so?
These are questions on both sides of the fence – the B-School as well as the graduate contemplating a master’s in management. As someone who graduated from XLRI in 1991, such questions never crossed my mind when I was taking the entrance tests.
For me, getting into a leading B-School and going through the two-year grind was a passport to a good private sector job. The thought of gaining all those skills to set up an enterprise, by myself or with friends, never even occurred to me. The goal was a good-paying job.
Some were fixated on banks, others on FMCG, while a few even favoured PSUs. Today’s students in B-Schools are drawn to consultants, tech companies, and start-ups.
A quick dipstick with my head-hunter friends and some would-be graduates for the purpose of writing this piece gave me the general impression that, in the vast ocean of B-Schools in the country, only a handful focus on preparing students for entrepreneurship. Many offer electives on the subject and have crafted courses on ‘innovation management’, but that, it seems, is not their forte.
Should B-Schools dismantle their age-old system of hiring teachers and instead bring in the flexibility of hiring working professionals, independent consultants, or even bureaucrats as faculty?
With these initial impressions, I spoke to a few friends who teach in B-Schools. From the initial “of course we do” stance, they quickly shifted to the “we are not ready” narrative. The B-School is traditionally about churning out managers. It is about executives and employees, not creating businesspeople. While they offer specific executive and development programmes on “running family businesses” and “how to run your business better”, there isn’t a dedicated two-year programme purely for those in the “start-up mode”.
Finally, I chatted with a few people in FICCI to ask where their MSME and start-up members go for education. The response was swift: “Engineering colleges. They are the ones who have created the culture of setting up start-ups”. The reply might seem like a generalisation, but if you step back, take a deep breath, and think hard, it’s probably spot on.
Engineering colleges teach innovation
Business schools teach innovation management.
Engineering colleges encourage taking chances.
Business schools teach how to manage chances.
Engineering colleges provide an ecosystem of open thinking. Business schools teach how to channel thinking.
Engineering colleges support the entrepreneurial spirit.
Business schools arm you with entrepreneurship management skills.
It is in the nature of the B-School to focus on creating executives and managers. They enrol students from diverse educational backgrounds – from the humanities to commerce to science to engineering to medicine.
They must prepare all of them, as a cohesive class, in fundamental business skills such as marketing, finance, HR, and operations management so they can be productive from day one in the corporate world, whether in the private or public sector, across industries.
The pedagogy and curriculum structure of a B-School does not allow much deviation, apart from electives in the second year. I was told that a few leading B-Schools attempted to make entrepreneurship courses compulsory in the second year but had to revert to making them electives due to feedback from both students and faculty. The students felt the course material was inadequate, while the faculty admitted they were not equipped to teach such courses.
This raises some crucial questions, and in these questions may lie the answers.
Should B-Schools dismantle their age-old system of hiring teachers and instead bring in the flexibility of hiring working professionals, independent consultants, or even bureaucrats as faculty? Should B-Schools partner with industry bodies on the one hand and engineering colleges on the other to co-create a curriculum on “how to become an entrepreneur”? Or should B-Schools create incubation centres (as some have) and make these the specialist institutes focused solely on creating entrepreneurs?
The most feasible answer might lie at the intersection of all three questions. The jury is still out on this one.