The new-age MBA is getting a fresh coat of STEM paint

If data is the new oil, the purple people are the new oilmen and some of India’s best B-schools are already building data drilling rigs to train these purple oilmen.

The management curricula of India’s top colleges are fast acquiring a technical flavour, showcasing courses and specialisations on hot STEM topics like data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning as a new breed of executives with a blend of management (blue) and technical (red) skills have become the need of the hour.

“There’s a fair degree of unanimity among senior executives in the industry that there are three important changes in the business environment—the advent of digital technology, the pervasive importance of data, and the growing importance of ESG (environmental, social and governance) parameters,” says Director Rishikesha T. Krishnan of IIM Bangalore (IIMB), which started a two-year full-time MBA in Business Analytics last year. The institute has retained its third position in the BT-MDRA B-school Ranking 2021. “Companies are pretty clear these need to be appropriately included in the MBA curriculum.”

Krishnan’s counterpart at IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA), Errol D’ Souza, agrees and points out that while students need to know the traditional management disciplines, “they also need to know how they are changing under the onslaught of ML and AI. We had underplayed the technology part earlier”. The institute, which ranked second in this year’s BT ranking, has launched a 16-month blended diploma programme in advanced business analytics for working professionals.

It’s not that technology or mathematics had no place in management education before. As anybody in corporate management would tell you, Statistics and Microsoft Excel sheets are their lifelines. But today it’s about AI, ML and analytics, and it’s not about coding. “When you see B-schools embracing these technologies, they are not actually teaching students how to code or how to read the heuristics behind them,” says IIM Lucknow (IIML) Director Archana Shukla. “But B-schools are definitely enabling them to make sense of the data.” The institute, which has participated in the BT-MDRA B-school rankings for the first time, has ranked fourth.

The applications of such an approach go way beyond e-commerce and technology. From ensuring a hospital’s procurement is integrated with all the needs of a patient, to pricing peak-time ticket fares for a travel firm, to understanding consumption patterns for a traditional products company, every company’s management today has to rely on data analytics to make decisions.

Beer maker AB InBev has a dedicated Growth Analytics Centre in India to churn out insights from small and big data. People Director (India & South East Asia) Tanushree Mishra says data literacy, if not expertise, is crucial because “our intuition and experience are built on a world that does not exist today and will change even more rapidly tomorrow. In fact, even choosing which business school we should go and hire talent from is all driven by multiple data sets now”.

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