IIM C: Building Research-conscious Leaders

Established in 1961, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta is the first IIM that was set up under the purview of HRD ministry. As a public autonomous institute of management, it was set up as a joint effort of the government, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management (MIT), the Government of West Bengal, The Ford Foundation and Indian industry.

Aside from being one of the best in the country, IIM-C is ranked 23rd in the Financial Times Global Masters in Management 2016 — one of the only three IIMs that shared the list with world’s top management institutes such as Harvard Business School, London Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Columbia Business School, etc. Only 5 other business schools in Asia and 73 business schools around the world are currently ‘Triple Accredited’.

IIM-C offers Post Graduate Diploma in Management, Post Graduate Programme for Executives, PGPEX-Visionary Leadership in Manufacturing, Fellow Programme, Executive Education, CEMS-Master’s in International Management.

PGPEX-VLM is a unique course at IIM-C, which aims at enhancing skills of executives and producing leaders in the manufacturing sector. The course is being conducted jointly by three premier institutes of India, including IIT Kanpur and IIT Madras. The course has been designed in consultation with industry, Confederation of Indian Industry, Japan International Cooperation Agency, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Government of India and Ministry of HRD.

In a bid to become a global institution, IIM-C has joined CEMS, an elite club of 28 premier B-schools from across the world, as an academic partner. IIM-C is the only Indian member of this renowned alliance of leading global business schools and multinational corporations. The IIM-C campus is spread over sprawling 135 acres of land in Joka, Kolkata. The institute has a library with collection of more than 1.6 lakh books and bound journals and 40,000 online full-text journals. IIM-C offers on-campus accommodation for all students enrolled in residential programmes. They have five modern residence halls and recently added a world-class hostel, ‘Lake View Hostel.’

“IIM-C is a one off experience, a beautiful campus always brimming with activity. The faculty and course structure provides a unique combination of academic rigour and flexibility for co-curricular and extra-curricular activities to its students. It gives you freedom to make decisions about the way you wish to evolve during your stay there,” says Ankit Kumar, 30, an alumnus of PGDM, class of 2013.

IIM-C is known to engage in consultancy for businesses and hardcore research. Aside from these, the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta Innovation Park (IIMCIP), an incubator, has planned to launch a challenge targeting 5,000 startup ideas by March next year. IIMCIP promotes entrepreneurship and innovation in research and business through industry-academia partnership. Through this programme, it plans to support more than 40 startups with funding of up to Rs 25 lakh. The programme is a collaboration between the company, DFID UK and Technology Development Board, India, to aid for-profit social enterprises, in eastern India. About 27 per cent of offers were made in the finance and analytics space; whereas e-commerce was the most lucrative sector with offers from Amazon, Flipkart, Ola cabs, RedBus, Uber, CarDekho.com, etc. AdCuratio, a first time recruiter, offered systems and strategy roles for their international offices.

IIM-C has various Centres of Excellence, which facilitates high quality research. One such centres is the state-of-art Financial Research and Trading Lab. This aims to support advanced applied research in financial markets. IIM-C is the only IIM to have access to a Bloomberg terminal. Apart from this, the Lab is also equipped with a trading exchange simulator with real time data feed from five markets — NSE-Cash, F&O, BSE-Cash, NCDEX and MCX.

Aside from this, the institute also has the Case Research Center, which looks to create a repository of India-based teaching cases and notes that can be used by faculty of various business schools in the country and abroad.