Edu-leaders

IIM Ahmedabad Alumni Association and Anna University have announced that they will jointly host a Management Education Conference in Chennai emphasising on the need for Indian B-schools to shift the current curriculum focus from 'knowing' to 'doing' and 'being', and developing globally competent leaders.

The conference, 'Rethinking Management Education with Innovation and Creativity', will be held on October 29 this year and is spearheaded by renowned Harvard Professor Srikant Datar and is inspired by his best-selling book on the same topic, 'Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads', written post the global recession of 2008, when the competence of managers from established B-schools was being questioned.

The IIMs at Ahmedabad and Calcutta are the knowledge partners for the conference. Accomplished business leaders such as Lakshmi Narayanan of Cognizant Technologies and Bhaskar Bhat of Titan Industries will speak at the event. The event has attracted participation from business schools and innovation executives across the country.

Professor Dr P Mannar Jawahar, VC, Anna University, who is also the Chairman of the Advisory Committee, said that this conference will be useful in designing the curriculum for the 500 odd engineering colleges which have come under the control of Anna University recently.

Muralidharan, President, IIM-AAA Chennai, said, “There are a lot of changes happening around us. The recession in the US and Europe and economic resurgence of China and India, the emergence of newer products/systems call for skill sets in management graduates that are relevant in today's environment. We need to rethink and align the pedagogy to current economic and business requirements.”

Kandaswamy Bharathan, Visiting Professor at IIM-A and Chairperson of the Organizing Committee of the conference said, “Creativity and innovation have become essential ingredients for success in business. Management graduates need to be able to drive innovation in the companies that employ them. The main objectives of this conference are to understand the current coverage and scope of innovation in the MBA programmes, to provide insights as to how creativity leads to innovation and how creativity skills can be taught to business management students and to share best practices on teaching creativity and innovation management.”