The Department Head of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur‘s MBA program Prof Jayanta Chatterjee speaks to PaGaLGuY.com about what makes the IIT Kanpur MBA special and what new things can the incoming batch expect.

What differentiates the IIT Kanpur MBA from other IITs? How are these differentiating factors a better bet for students?

Primarily, we believe that distinctiveness in this context does not relate to what, but to how. Over two years of the MBA program, we have about 1,000 contact hours with each student within which the candidate can opt for up to 250 hours of specialization in finance, operations, marketing like most other institutes. But we also offer vertical domain specialization opportunity in infrastructure, service or manufacturing through 250 hours of project based learning. Our program aims at creating transformational leaders of tomorrow who are not only equipped with sound knowledge but also encouraged to step out of theoretical models into real-life scenarios. The high faculty to student ratio enables our students to gain deeper insights into the areas of their choice. This constant emphasis on hands on learning through live issues distinguishes us.

The students entrepreneurial innovation spirit is also nurtured through multiple programs and projects. Of particular interest is the unique location of IIT Kanpur that allows them to engage in immersive socio-technical innovation projects.

Hence, students of IIT Kanpur MBA program can leverage the core strengths of the department along with the unique IIT Kanpur combination of academic rigor with intellectual freedom. We believe our program nurtures and polishes engineers into techno-managers with a penchant for innovation.

What areas of management has IIT Kanpur become consistently better at, either in terms of faculty or opportunities of learning?

IME has consciously and consistently tried to inculcate among its students the realization that management is as much a clinical art as a science. So we have always tried to go beyond mere analytical and cognitive skills or stylized treatment of complex issues and encouraged our students to engage with current business realities. So we strive to be consistently better at multi-disciplinary understanding of team dynamics and systems approach. Our alumni have also reinforced this trend. We have some of the best minds and most respected academia as faculty. Their diverse experience as well as their long standing commitment towards the management program provides our students with an enviable pool of knowledge to tap into. But more importantly during 3^rd and 4^th semester they get opportunities to take up investigative projects to apply managerial/entrepreneurial models to cutting edge developments in Behavioural Economics, Green Energy, Nano- Chemistry, advanced materials, Cloud Computing or social informatics.

This varied exposure to the various departments of IIT Kanpur, give IME students a sand-box to develop techno-commercial strategies, see their impact, and analyse the interplay of desirability, feasibility viability & sustainability. They get used to Systems thinking.

What does IIT Kanpur not teach that other IIT MBA schools do?

Distinctiveness is not in what we teach or not teach but in how we facilitate learning rather than teach through discourses. In short, the distinctiveness comes from intense use of andragogy rather than pedagogy. I would refrain from any comparison with any other institute. Our aim is to enable and enhance managerial talents to execute complex tasks efficiently while seeing the big picture intensely.

What are some of the new things that prospective students can look forward to at IIT Kanpur IME?

IIT Kanpur in general and IME department in particular, continuously seek new avenues of improvements. In 2011, we have significantly enhanced our infrastructure and shifted to a new building with state of the art facilities. The students have round the clock access to management research labs and high power computational facilities. As India Inc opens up to new market segments, our proximity to rural hinterlands becomes our strength and facilitates the understanding of the realities of business and how it could be bettered. Our new management research laboratories connect to key industries and institutions. Some of the new facilities are: Financial inclusion and innovation lab, Green Products and Service Design Lab, Digital manufacturing lab, Enterprise Integration Lab, Management Science Research Lab, Social Innovation and Case Research Lab.

Your website says that your pedagogy is centered around case method, projects, simulations, etc. Isn’t such a method compromised due to a class comprised of people with largely similar backgrounds & experiences?

To answer this question, I would first like to discuss the options that students have in selecting their courses.

IIT Kanpur offers specialized courses in each department relevant to the corresponding stream of education (say, Mechanical, Aerospace Engineering, Design, or Industrial Engineering). While it is mandatory for all students to pursue compulsory courses from their own department, they have many elective subjects as well, for which they can opt for inter-departmental courses. The MBA programme thus opens up and embraces other departments of IIT Kanpur.

This is particularly helpful for our budding entrepreneurs: for example, a student studying BTech (Chemical Engineering) might develop a new process to efficiently trap a harmful gas.Then, in order to learn how to efficiently market his/her idea to fruition, he/she can take the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Course in our Department, or specialize in Services Management if he is developing a new service plan and team up with our MBA students. Thereafter the student team can go to our in-house incubation centre SIIC for seed money. Our students can take up electives like Product Design or Data Mining & Analytics in other departments. Students from diverse departments do our Management of Technology or International Business courses. Such healthy cross-departmental education model provides good diversity of perspectives in our interactive classes.

The better set of b-schools in India is experimenting with admission criteria to reduce the number of engineers and increase diversity. Will IIT b-schools too have to open up to people with non-engineering/non-science backgrounds in order to stay relevant?

Having only engineers and technologies for management discourses is in synergy with our vision and original plan. We have adopted this emphasis on techno-managerial specialisation by choice. However academic senate of IIT Kanpur is already working on new dual degree courses like BTech-MBA or MSc-MBA which will be announced soon. We also envisage sectoral specialisation courses like Construction Management, Power Systems Management or Design & Media Management in due course of time. So, our continuing emphasis will be on inter-disciplinary approaches to innovate new models.