After Harvard, Wharton looks for a classroom in India

The Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, is the latest entrant to the growing Rs 350-crore executive education space in India. The school, ranked number two by Financial Times in its Global MBA rankings, said it will soon have its own centre in India.

“Within the next two years we will have a physical presence in India. Through the centre, we will not only conduct executive education, but will also be able to use it as a place for the alumni to converge and our faculty to convene for research. We will have office space and classrooms. We are looking at a centralised location and Mumbai is what suits our needs the most, as of now,” said Jason Wingard, vice-dean, executive education at the Wharton school.

Wharton joins the likes of University of Chicago, Harvard Business School, Tuck School of Business, INSEAD, Oxford University’s Said Business School and Duke University, among others to offer their executive education programmes in India.

“We have realised that many of the emerging markets continue to grow and it is important for us to have a variety of locations around the world. We are present in India, China and Brazil.” Wharton receives about 10,000 executive education participants on its campus every year and India is among the top three countries in terms of participants from outside the US.

“We offer both, custom programme as well as open enrolment. We work with many companies in India including Wipro technologies and ICICI Bank among others. Because of the deep relationship that we have with companies and the large alumni base we have in India, we chose India to offer the first certificate in India.”

Wharton has began a certificate programme, the Accelerated Development Program (ADP), for business leaders in India from January 2012. Track one of the programme will have three Wharton executive education programmes in India at Rs 6,60,000 (plus service tax). Track two will see two executive education programmes in India and one in Philadelphia in the US for Rs 500,000 (plus service tax) and Wharton Philadelphia programme at a discount of 25 per cent. Three executive education programmes will also be offered — Customer Driven Marketing: Strategies for Profitable Growth; Strategic Thinking and Leadership for Growth and Using Finance for Strategic Growth. The programmes would be for four days. A fourth programme, focused on leadership, will be added in the second-half of 2012.