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The Audyogik Shikshan Mandal (ASM) Group is India’s only business school to offer a curriculum that is integrated with Harvard Business School.  Dr. Sandeep Panchpande, Chairman, ASM Group, spoke to BE’s Aritra Mitra regarding the changing trends in the field of management studies.

Q. Tell us something about the emerging trends in the field of management studies?

A.The field of management studies is going through a transition. The employment market has changed drastically and the demand on institutions to deliver a curriculum that is aligned to the newer demands and skill sets are growing. The use of technology in classrooms and the extent of digital and online penetration in both course delivery and content are growing rapidly. The gig economy and the changing attitude of millennials towards jobs have been forcing a shift in emphasis towards skill development courses as compared to traditional MBA streams.

Hence, the institutions that offer industry integrated specialisation courses are in demand. Furthermore, the current breed of MBA aspirants are also giving preference to institutions who emphasise on practical training and direct engagement with industry experts apart from the case-study based pedagogy. Also, specialised courses have emerged as the norm in the last couple of years. Supply chain management, retail management, rural and agri-business management, social entrepreneurship, international finance and others have proved to be popular.

Q. How can management studies be made more industry-oriented?

A. Initially, the approach adopted by majority of management institutions was to get some people from the industry to interact with students. However, the limitations to such an approach were soon realised. While the sharing of knowledge and inputs by experts is helpful, but it is a one-off situation and most students forget these in time and there is no desired impact. For real industry orientation to happen, industry experts need to be involved in designing the curriculum and also on the delivery front. It will be better if they can partner with institutions for the entire course, take ownership and provide additional certification from their end. We have initiated this system and partnered with IBM for analytics and SAP for enterprise management. Another important element is providing internships wherein the students gain first hand industry experiences. Regular talks by visiting industry experts are another important aspect.

Q. How is the curriculum of ASM different from other business schools and how is it going to help the students?

A. During my days at the University of Leeds, UK, I was always curious about how far traditional case-study based courses were useful for handling real-life situations. So, when I took the responsibility of ASM, I was determined to design a course which will not just be a line in the students’ resume but will actually add value and prepare them for their future career choices. So, we focused on industry integrated courses. Currently, we have more than 26 courses, most of which are curated by respective industry experts along with our expert faculty members.

Since the beginning of our journey in 1983, we have been focusing on providing innovative and relevant education to our students including professionals, who opt for our executive courses. Providing innovative teaching pedagogy in both short-term and long-term certificate courses have been our specialty. We have recently introduced a technology that is similar to Amazon’s Alexa for teaching, communicating and distributing information to our students. Also, to make the educational process more interesting we use gamification, simulations in finance, marketing, HR mechanisms and supply chain techniques.

We take immense pride in the fact that currently, we are the only B-school in India who has collaboration with HBS online courses. We also have collaboration with global institutes such as Vistula University (Poland), CETYS University (Mexico) and University of Applied Sciences (Poland). We are planning to continue the trend and looking forward to many more such collaborations.