India's executive education market attracts International B-schools

India’s growing over Rs 350-crore executive education continues to attract B-schools. While the US-headquartered Harvard Business School (HBS) opened its classroom in India at the Taj Lands End, a five-star luxury hotel at Bandra, in suburban Mumbai recently, the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, is firming up plans to have a physical presence 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 we 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 suits our needs the most, as of now,” says Jason Wingard, vice-dean, executive education at the Wharton school.

Wharton joins the likes of University of Chicago, Tuck School of Business, INSEAD, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, Duke University and Canada-based University of Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business, 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 in its campus every year and India is among the top three countries in terms of participants coming from outside the US.

The B-school offers both, custom programme as well as open enrolment and works with many companies in India including Wipro Technologies and ICICI Bank, to name a few. “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. We have to finalise the range of services we would be offering beyond executive education,” added Wingard.

Also, Harvard Business School’s space at the Taj Lands End hotel will be an amphitheatre-style classroom fashioned after the ones at Harvard Business School in Boston. The B-school has been conducting executive education or management development programmes (MDPs) in India since 2008 at five-star hotels.

HBS and its India Research Center (IRC), which was set up in 2006, offer three executive education programmes in India. This year, while it has already offered one executive education programme, it will offer two more between March and May 2012.