Harvard Business School (HBS) has no plans to compete with Indian b-schools, but it would continue to help them build capacity to meet the local demand, said Harvard Business School Dean Prof Nitin Nohria in Mumbai on Tuesday.

“Last year, we distributed 429,000 case studies in India and are involved with 16 business schools to train their professors in becoming better teachers,” he told mediapersons during his Mumbai pit-stop of an 11-day world tour.

The IIT Bombay-educated Prof Nohria, who took over as Harvard’s new Dean earlier this month, is on an 11-day world tour of London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Shanghai and San Francisco to meet HBS alumni and business leaders.

Speaking about HBS’ focus on India, he said that the 102-year old school has created 80 case studies on Indian businesses which were used widely across other business schools. The school will continue to do more research and establish a center to grow its Executive Development Programs in India, he added. Currently, HBS conducts these programs out of hotel premises in Indian cities.

Speaking at Assocham’s and the Piramal Group’s 13th JRD Tata Memorial Oration on ‘India and the Globalization of Business’ in South Mumbai in the evening, he narrated how last year several HBS students had chosen to complete their summer internships in India, rejecting offers in the US or Europe.

“When I joined HBS in 1988, nearly all of the case studies taught at the school were of American businesses. But last year, half the cases developed were international case studies,” he said.

In the insightful talk, the co-author and co-editor of 16 management books said that Indian companies will have to invest heavily in innovation in order to compete in the globalized world.

Edited excerpts from the talk

• The success of American businesses lies in their ability to be dynamic. Every decade of the 20th century saw businesses reinventing themselves to survive and compete.
• Around the time India opened up its economic policies in the 1990s, Indian companies woke up to international competition by making themselves more efficient. Which is why in the 1990s we witnessed the wave of ISO 9000 certifications.
• A few companies tried to fight competition by using political lobbying and manipulating regulatory mechanisms, but soon they realized that these tactics didn’t work in the new world. Many of these companies eventually became irrelevant while some, such as Bajaj Auto saw their monopolistic ways of business failing and reinvented themselves to survive.
• Post-millennium, Indian companies started to compete by reacting to local needs by building customized products. Tata Motors’ ‘Tata Ace’ mini-sized truck for small businesses or Bharti Enterprises’ hedging on the rural Indian market provided them competitive edge.
• The next stage of evolution for Indian companies will be to build capacity for innovation. If one takes a hard look at Indian companies, there is no globally competitive innovative product to be seen yet. Even the Tata Ace or Tata Nano have not proven themselves to be viable globally.
• Companies such as Samsung have invested on innovation processes to secure market success with a product line that has beaten others such as Sony and is threatening Apple.
• In India, the pharmaceutical sector has a great chance to build globally innovative products, including mass-usage drugs.
• Though many might like to think of the 21st century as one that belongs to Asia, I believe that no single region will dominate. Yes, there might a decade when China is on top, and another decade when India is ahead, but the USA, Europe, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Bangladesh, Turkey and others will also rise.

Prof Nohria’s intellectual interests center on human motivation, leadership, corporate transformation and accountability and sustainable economic and human performance.