Sustainability of Indian management education institutions: Perspectives from leaders in academia

The purpose of this paper is to explore perspectives of academicians in leadership positions in Indian business schools on the sustainability of management education institutions in India.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 respondents including directors, deans and vice-chancellors of private and public sector institutions offering management programmes across India. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim for analysis.

All the respondents strongly supported the need for building sustainable management education institutions. Different factors affecting sustainability of institutions that emerged from the interviews included focus on local context and inter-disciplinarity, visionary leadership and culture, country specific curriculum and pedagogy, sustained industry-academia collaboration, faculty orientation, training, retention and growth. On the basis of the factors identified, a directional proposition with the perspective of blue ocean strategy is proposed.

There is a vast scope for exploring issues, challenges and strategies for building sustainable management education institutions. Literature in this field in the Indian context is very limited. This paper is one of the few attempts to study perspectives and experiences of leaders in Indian business schools on the sustainability of their institutions.