In today’s complex global business environment and fast changing business needs, there is often only a narrow window of time to profit from today’s opportunities as they become tomorrow’s commodities. These high velocity business environment changes have also created high velocity obsolescence of today’s business skills. This creates an immense challenge for organizations to maintain the right mix of employee competencies and skills. Social media competencies is a case in point, as it is moving rapidly from a “time-pass technology for youngsters” to a disruptive technology for both, crowdsourcing of new knowledge as well as for building powerful social network-based communities, strong enough to change even the government of a country (aka Egypt)!
Consequently this also poses a challenge for management education in terms of their teaching, research and graduate characteristics. Fortunately, Innovation has shown the way out for those who have the courage to adopt it. We believe that for organizations (including FIIB), innovation is required to stay ahead of the game and can serve as a sustainable competitive advantage. The 21st century business education, cannot therefore afford to ignore ‘Innovation’; but at the same time there are hardly any established management theories which can be used to teach students of management on ‘How to Innovate’. The only way management education can impart this skill is by going through continuous innovative experimentation and learning itself, and an entrepreneurial attitude in their adaptation in the formal MBA curriculum. Therefore at FIIB, we have included‘continuous innovation’ as part of our vision statement, and it is a connecting theme that runs through the entire gamut of activities.
Innovating to Learn– The Learning Process
It all starts with FIIB’s Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) continuously scanning the changing business environment and emerging demand for newer managerial skills; benchmarking the existing curriculum both in terms of quantity and quality; and continuously upgrading it to align with industry needs. For instance, when IQAC highlighted the need for better problem formulation and experimentation’ as a skill for graduates, FIIB responded with a course titled Structuring Decision Processes. Similarly, addition of courses on Digital Marketing, Business Intelligence & Analytics, andEntrepreneurial Innovation, into the core at FIIB, are examples of continuous innovation in the curriculum. For FIIB’s course structure, please refer: http://fiib.edu.in/
Next comes innovation in the learning process management, which starts from a highly student-centric course design (focussing on Learning Outcomes and aligning pedagogy/assessment with these Outcomes) and course delivery (focussing on assessment quality, student performance, and student feedback). Another support for innovation in teaching is through breaking down the functional silos in learning through cross-functional teaching by faculty. For example, Digital Marketing is jointly taught by Marketing and Information Systems Management (ISM) faculty and HRIS is taught jointly by HRM and ISM faculty.
The external feedback loop at FIIB comprising of: subject experts that undertake periodic reviews and provide feedback, which are further triangulated with the feedback provided from several other stakeholders, including recruiters (on the marriage of the curriculum and the participants’ industry readiness), and the academic council (on the design of courses to include the cutting edge management thoughts), additionally engenders a curriculum that is strongly grounded in management theory and has a strong practical flavor.
Learning to Innovate– Research and Outreach
At FIIB, strong emphasis is provided on Innovation as a research domain. Faculty members have conducted several projects focusing on Innovation and their work has been published by leading international publishers. To further strengthen the efforts, FIIB has developed Center for Service Innovation and Business Agility (CeSIBA), which involves itself in executive training, consulting projects, and scholarly research. FIIB has also introduced B-Plan competitions and incubation support along with courses like Entrepreneurial Innovation to foster innovation through Entrepreneurship and Outreach. Another innovative opportunity in these fields comes through field projects given to students which focus more on the business issues rather than the field of origin of the issue! For example, case studies of social media use in marketing is an innovative topic largely initiated through student projects.
As embodied by FIIB, Innovation should indeed pervade all aspects of institutional activities be it teaching, research, consulting, or student outreach. Only then, a management institution could stand out of the crowd and create an inspiration for the business world it is strongly connected with.
Note: This is a sponsored article and has NOT been written by the PaGaLGuY Editorial Team. It is intended from an informational perspective only and it is upto the readers to research and verify the claims and judgements in the article before reaching a conclusion.