"Top Harvard talent to teach in India"

Professor David Yoffie, Senior Associate Dean & Chair of Harvard Business School Executive Education Programmes, visited India to launch some new sessions. He spoke to BT's Rahul Sachitanand in between sessions with programme attendees.

On how executive education has changed
There has been a dramatic change in this market. For example, we had basically two programmes until 15-20 years ago. Now, we have several programmes across three categories—long, short and customised—with the last one being the most popular. We had around 5,000 people take our programmes a decade ago, now that number has exceeded 10,000.

On how the slowdown affected executive education
Strangely, we had our best year in executive education last year, since there was a lot of pent-up demand we could fulfil. People now want courses with a more global outlook, especially focussed on emerging markets.

On future plans for India
We have launched three programmes in India and two of them— building a global enterprise in India and developing India strategies for real estate—are unique to this country. We will have top Harvard talent with expertise in emerging markets teaching these courses. We have begun exploring opportunities to set up a campus in India.