Academia Speak
“Management Education Can’t Rely Upon Outdated Nostrums” Professor Philip Taylor, Academic Director of Programmes, Strathcylde SKIL Business School shared his thoughts and views on the Indian education scenario and their roadmap for the Indian market with Pragya Gupta. Excerpts:
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Academia Speak
What pedagogical innovations are you planning to bring in India? Strathclyde SKIL Business School (SBSS) is adopting a unique and coherent approach to delivering education in India through our state-of-the-art campus in Greater Noida. This is not an off-shored facility but a fully integrated campus within the University of Strathclyde that has a unique partnership with SKIL. A key element in our pedagogy is the importance of delivering high quality education that applies theoretical knowledge emanating from cutting edge research to concrete practical setting. Strathclyde’s philosophy is best encapsulated in the fulfilment of its mission as ‘The Place of Useful Learning’. This underlying principle will inform the first programme to be delivered by SBSS, the Master in Management which commences in September 2011, and the Bachelor in Business Studies which follows in September 2012 and then the MBA in September 2013.
How do you see India as a market for higher education? All informed commentators, including the Government of India, acknowledge that the demand for higher education is set to grow significantly in the short to medium term. For the next few decades, India’s population will remain young, and higher education will be needed to equip them to play their rightful roles in the knowledge economy. Due to the economic growth in the Indian economy, and as more and more families join the relatively better off sections of society, the demand for higher education is likely to grow at an accelerated pace. Expansion will grow apace particularly in the area of business and management studies at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
What are the challenges enduring in the Indian market? What are the key issues that need to be addressed to produce more skilled and quality workforce? The main challenge in the Indian market is to ensure that the demand for business and management undergraduate and postgraduate education can be fulfilled by premium provision which ensures that students are able to access the highest quality learning experience. Managers in the contemporary Indian context face the enormous challenge of leading their organisations in conditions of rapid change. Indeed it could be argued that the only constant is change. It follows that the emerging generation of business and management graduates and postgraduates are equipped with ability to apply their knowledge in complex and contradictory situations. How can management education in India be reinvented in a way that can project it to the forefront of leadership and management training worldwide? Management education in India cannot consist of rote learning or rely
upon outdated nostrums. Successful managers must be able to draw upon the knowledge derived from the very cutting edge of critical management research and be steeped in an approach which understands the vital need for creative application of problem solving based upon that knowledge. In this sense advanced theoretical understanding based upon contemporary research is of great necessity for informed managerial and business practice. What are your expectations from the Indian government? We believe that the Indian Government is very focussed on the importance of making education available to the Indian population across all geographies and at all levels. In order to do this, we are seeing the Government moving away from what was largely a prescriptive regime towards a more participative environment where the learners and educators are able to interactively decide what the content of education needs to be, and how this should be designed and delivered so that it can be harnessed for the betterment of both society and the individual. We expect this trend to continue and indeed accelerate both in scope and pace. Please share you plans and roadmap for the Indian market? India is a focus area for us, and we see the Indian market to be one of the core areas for us. We have started with management education in Greater Noida, and over the span of the next three years, we will be rapidly expanding the scope to cover undergraduate students and persons with experience with the BBS and the MBA programmes. Our plans are to set up other centres across India in the years ahead, and also to expand the disciplines to cover Science and Engineering, other subjects in which the University of Strathclyde is a recognised leader. Kindly shed light on the reason for the collaboration between SKIL and Strathclyde? SKIL Infrastructure is one of the leading infrastructure developers in India.
digitalLEARNING / JULY 2011
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Academia Speak
“we see the Indian market to be one of the core areas for us. We have started with management education in Greater Noida, and over the span of the next three years, we will be rapidly expanding” In our early discussions, it became evident that SKIL was bringing the practical perspective from India to the equation. This is critical in any such venture – the educational institution brings the academic and research inputs to the table, but given each country’s own social, cultural and economic characteristics, someone like SKIL is needed to pin the academic inputs to a practical situation. SKIL and Strathclyde share similar views on the approach to education, and we are both convinced that this was a very good fit. Students joining our Strathclyde SKIL Business School programmes will
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• Philip Taylor is Professor of Work and Employment Studies in the Department of Human Resource Management at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He is also Associate Dean International at Strathclyde Business School and is the Academic Director of programmes for the Strathclyde SKIL Business School (SSBS) in India. • Professor Taylor has researched and published extensively on many subjects including work organisation and employment relations in call centres, the offshoring of business services (especially to India), lean working, HRM and occupational health and safety. He was editor of the Work, Employment and Society (2008-2011) and has extensive editorial and refereeing experience. • Professor Taylor has disseminated research findings to government organisations (e.g. European Commission, European Parliament, the UK Parliament, Scottish Government), to employer bodies (e.g. Nasscom, Customer Contact Association, Comptia), individual companies, NGOs (e.g. International Labour Organisation) and trade unions (e.g. Union Network International, Unite the Union, Communication Workers Union). • Specialist teaching subjects include, Employment Relations, Performance Management, Participation and Involvement, Globalisation and Value Chains. He has extensive experience in supervising in-company student internships. He has also been Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Management and at Curtin Business School (Perth, Western Australia). receive an internationalised experience in key respects. For example, Strathclyde faculty will deliver 50 percent of teaching on the Indian campus. In addition, students will visit the Strathclyde campus in Glasgow for a semester where they will join our international community of students existing courses. The first programme to be offered will be a distinctive two-year Masters in Management (MiM), aimed at recent graduates from diverse disciplines, which will provide them with a solid foundation for the world of business and management. During the first year, students will do a foundation year in India and in the second year will spend a semester at Strathclyde doing three specialist electives. The programme culminates with an in-company placement during which the students conduct relevant research and complete a research project. As the Greater Noida campus ramps up and the Indian faculty grows in numbers the opportunities for research collaboration will similarly grow between the two geographies. In addition programmes and modules will benefit from the cross fertilisation of ideas by staff across the two campuses. Visits of Indian faculty to Strathclyde will not be encouraged but have been budgeted for.
Please comment on Strathclyde’s triple accredited status? What also makes Strathclyde Business School exceptional is the fact that it is one of only less than one percent of business schools to have been accredited by the three main bodies that evaluate their quality; the Association of MBAs (based in the United Kingdom), the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (based in the USA) and EQUIS (the quality assurance scheme run by the European Foundation for Management Development based in Brussels. It is additionally important to recognise that the MiM has already received recognition by AMBA. What are your strategies to position yourself as a research-led institution? As indicated above, Strathclyde Business School places considerable emphasis on the central importance of high quality research. This is reflected in many different ways; that its staff is at the forefront of globally significant research networks, that it houses some of the leading journals in the business and management fields and that the outcomes of research activity are profoundly significant for business and public policy. \\