B-SCHOOL ESSENTIALS
RESEARCH IS A MAJOR VEXING CONCERN IN INDIAN BUSINESS EDUCATION
"IIT professors seem to have done better research output than IIM faculty"
In a pathbreaking study conducted for the first time to guage the research output in business education between 1968 and 2014, the four authors two each from IIM Bangalore and Xavier Institute of Management Bhubaneshwar have discovered that the professors from IITs fare better than the IIMs and there was not much difference between the research done at the private institutions and that of the public institutions. While IIM A, IIM B and ISB predictably had a higher out put in terms of research, those with international research degrees fared better in all instituions. The inference is not hard to see that the research emphasis is not high even in IIMs as there is more emphasis on training managers than producing impactful knowledge through research.
The reserach has been carried out by Prof Biresh Sahoo from Xavier Institute of Management, Xavier University, Xavier Square, Bhubaneswar 751013, India e-mail: biresh@ximb.ac.in, Ramadhar Singh from Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore 560076, India e-mail: ramadhar@iimb.ernet.in, Bineer Mishra from Xavier Institute of Management, Xavier University, Xavier Square, Bhubaneswar 751013, India e-mail: bineet1986@gmail.com and KrithigaSankaran from Indian Institute of Management, Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore 560076, India e-mail: krithiga.sankaran@iimb.ernet.in
International schools have been recently entering into research collaboration with Indian institutions as well. The All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE), for example, has now come up with the guidelines on how a foreign university can collaborate with the Indian academia in research. Global higher education brands have already opened research centers in India to tap the research opportunities that India offers . While the Harvard Business School has a research center in Mumbai, the University of Chicago and Deakin University have similar research centers in New Delhi. Such powerhouse research centers supposedly aim at engaging colleges, research institutes, business entities, and the GOI offices to work on different projects. These developments highlight the growing importance of business research and of India as an exciting site for such research.
Despite the growing emphasis on research in management schools and other academic institutions of higher learning in India, management schools have not yet met world standards in research. For example, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and the Central Universities (CUs)--the premier institutions established by GOI--did not make to the list of top 100 productive schools across three successive surveys. Consequently, the Ministry of the Human Resource Development (MHRD) of GOI sponsored the PanIIM Conferences at Goa in 2013 and at Kozhikode in 2014.
Unfortunately, the Goa Conference found no paper worthy of an award, confirming the poor quality of research. Thus, research productivity of the management institutions continues to be a matter of vexing concern for academics and policy-makers in India. Given the continued interest in research productivity of management scholars in India, we set out to develop a composite index of research productivity that could gauge how creative and productive faculty members of management schools have been over the years.