ISB plans big for social ventures

This is an article published in The Economic Times on 30 Aug 2007.

Social entrepreneurship is the latest buzzword on business school campuses world over. Top institutes like Harvard Business School, Stanford-GSB, Oxford University's Said Business School and New York University's Stern School of Business are sharpening their focus on ventures that make a difference to societies and communities. And now the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB) is all set to spawn entrepreneurs to address that segment of the population.

The school has just signed an MoU with Cornell University to set up a BOP (Bottom of the Pyramid) Lab within the precincts of ISB's Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship. From Cornell's side the centre is being handled by Stuart Hart, the person credited with generating the idea of BOP along with C K Prahalad. The Wadhwani Centre has already incubated several business ventures since its inception in 2001. But with the BOP Lab ISB wants to set its sights on problems faced by a developing country.

Says ISB deputy dean Ajit Rangnekar, "People usually view problems from the point of view of charity but that is not sustainable in the long run. We want to support ventures that meet social objectives and are also self-sustaining.'' What this means is simple: solve a problem and also generate revenues that can be ploughed back into the business.

Take the Jaipur Foot, which is a great concept but there are limits to how far it can go based on its current business model. "As demand for the Jaipur Foot rises, it needs more donors. A better idea would be to take the Jaipur Foot abroad,'' says Rangnekar, whose school has worked on a plan to create a company to expand the footprint of the Jaipur Foot.

The idea of the BOP Lab is simple: take up issues that concern rural India--such as drinking water, clean energy and housing--and set up companies that solve them. "We have already got an enthusiastic response from companies to contribute capital to fund these ventures. But we'll manage the funds ourselves,'' says Rangnekar.

ISB has approached global and Indian firms to generate initial funding for the centre. It needs at least Rs 1-2 crore. They plan to announce the funding by September-October. "In three years, we aim to make the centre self-sustaining,'' says Rangnekar.

Key Dates for Admissions for the Class of 2009

Admissions Calendar - For Indian Passport Holders

Key Dates for Admissions Academic Year 2008-2009

Admissions Calendar -For Non-Indian Passport Holders

For all international applicants, the rolling application process begins on July 1, 2007 and goes on till Jan 31, 2008. The applicant will be interviewed within one month of the application submission date and will be informed about the decision two weeks from the date of the interview. International candidates may need additional time to arrange for their visas, housing, and financial aid, and to work on their English proficiency, hence they are encouraged to apply early.

For any further information or assistance please mail the admission section of ISB at admissions@isb.edu

ISB Admission Information Sessions - Part 2

The ISB conducts Information Sessions to reach out to all prospective students. The agenda for each session includes:

• A short film on the ISB (10 mins)
• A presentation on Admissions (50 mins)
• Question and Answer session (60 mins)

Information Session Schedule

India Locations

City: Ernakulam
Hotel: Taj Residency
Date: September 1, 2007
Timings: 5.00 pm - 7.00 pm

Registration: Register

City: Goa
Hotel: Park Plaza
Date: September 9, 2007
Timings: 3.00 pm- 5.00 pm

Registration: Register

International Locations

The ISB admissions team travels with the World MBA Tour and other educational fairs throughout the world. This is a unique opportunity for you to meet representatives of the ISB and discuss your future education and career goals. This year the ISB will not be participating in the WMBA US/Canada tours.You may visit http://www.topmba.com/ to register for the event.
International Tour Schedule

Country : UK
City: London
Day: Saturday
Date: Oct 13, 2007

Admission Information Sessions on Campus

The best way to explore what the ISB has to offer to its students is to visit ISB's sprawling campus on the outskirts of Hyderabad, for an On-Campus Information Session. At these sessions you can learn more about the ISB and about admissions into its Post Graduate Programme in Management (PGP) in particular. You will also get the chance to interact one-on-one with ISB's Admissions Staff and the Class of 2008.

The agenda for each session includes:

• Campus Tour (30 mins)
• A short film on the ISB (7 mins)
• A presentation on Admissions (30 mins)
• Question and Answer session (30- 45 mins)

You are welcome to bring your family/spouse/friends to the information session. However, INR 100 per person should be remitted as registration fee.

Schedule

September 21, 2007 3:00 pm- 5:00 pm Register
October 5, 2007 3:00 pm- 5:00 pm Register
October 26, 2007 3:00 pm- 5:00 pm Register

Class Attendance

Within the limits of class space and schedules, you may also get an opportunity to attend a lecture and experience first-hand the benefits of learning from some of the world’s leading management faculty. Classes are typically scheduled between Monday and Thursday. Please send in your request to attend a class to admissions@isb.edu and the Admissions team will get back to you at the earliest.

Disclaimer:- The above dates are taken from the website of ISB. Please check the dates from the website bfore registering for any excutive education programme.

The Global Social Venture Competition - An introduction

With this post, I complete my century in the arena of traget-ISB innings.

This post is about Global Social Venture Competition, which began in 1999 as a student-led initiative at the Haas School of Business in California, USA. In May 2001, Columbia Business School and The Goldman Sachs Foundation partnered with Haas to extend the reach of the competition and help grow a national platform for social ventures. In June 2003, the London Business School joined the competition partnership to extend the competition globally. In July 2005, the Indian School of Business was invited as an affiliate. In January 2006, the first Asia Semi-final round was held at the Indian School of Business.

This unprecedented partnership brings together the academic and financial worlds to support the creation of sustainable social ventures. The Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) is seeking promising social entrepreneurs to enter its 2007 Competition. If you are an entrepreneur (or budding entrepreneur!) with a financially sustainable venture that addresses a social or environmental problem, it encourages you to apply. Winning plans in the past have ranged from global health to microfinance, from cleantech to education, from fair trade to community development, from business concepts to operating companies, and have included for-profit and non-profit models.

What is GSVC?

GSVC is the largest and oldest student-led business plan competition providing mentoring, exposure, and prizes for social ventures from around the world. GSVC's mission is to catalyze the creation of social ventures, educate future leaders, and build awareness for social enterprises. The competition supports the creation of real businesses that bring about positive social change.

GSVC is organized by the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley in partnership with the Columbia Business School, London Business School, Indian School of Business, Yale School of Management, International University in Geneva, and a consortium of business schools in Korea. Every year, teams compete for more than $45,000 in cash and travel prizes, while gaining valuable feedback on their ventures.

What has GSVC achieved?

Since its inception in 1999, GSVC has awarded more than a quarter of a million dollars to emerging social ventures and has introduced early-stage social venture entrepreneurs to the investment community. Nearly 25% of past GSVC entrants are now operating companies.
How can I get involved?
1. Compete as an Entrant. If you have an idea for a social venture, or have an operating social venture, we encourage you to apply. Individuals or teams of any size from any country are eligible to compete in GSVC.

If you are looking to connect with a social venture or MBA student, visit the GSVC blog

Requirements: Every team must include at least one member who is a current student in ANY graduate business program or who has graduated from any graduate business program within the past 24 months. Operating companies are welcome to enter, though they must be less than 3 years old (as measured by first revenue or first patent issued). Plan can be for a for-profit or non-profit as long as either can be financially self-sustaining at scale.

o Every team must include at least one member who is a current student in ANY graduate business program or who has graduated from any graduate business program within the past 24 months.
o Operating companies are welcome to enter, though they must be less than 3 years old (as measured by first revenue or first patent issued).
o Plan can be for a for-profit or non-profit as long as either can be financially self-sustaining at scale.

2. Judge, Mentor, or Sponsor.

GSVC exposes entrepreneurs, investors, managers, and executives to the most promising new social ventures. Share your expertise by providing invaluable support as a volunteer mentor or judge. Sponsorships ensure that GSVC can continue to reward new ventures that integrate monetary and social benefit year after year.

For details on eligibility and how to get involved, visit GSVC

Key Dates for Indian / Asian Entries

November 15, 2006 Registration, Executive summaries due (to ISB)
January 12, 2007 Business Plans due (to ISB)
January 20, 2007 Initial Judging round at ISB
February 20, 2007 Short-listed teams submit revised plans (to ISB)
March 9-10, 2007 Asia Semi-final round at ISB
March 28, 2007 Finalists Business Plans due (to Haas)
April 12-14, 2007 Global Finals at Haas, Berkeley
April 14, 2007 GSVC Social Impact Symposium

Contact email: gsvc@haas.berkeley.edu

Useful Link: GSVC at ISB

Academic Rigour and Curriculum -3

One of the very few pains of being at ISB is the continuous, unhealthy and hostile barrage of assignment submissions you have to face every other day. You have classes on the first four days of the week and from Thursday evening to Saturday evening, it's party time. Professors diligently ensure that you have enough work in the form of case analyses or a truckload of mathematical problems to solve throughout the week and especially in the weekends.

One of the current students say "As the deadline for assignment submission approaches, the population density in the library and the atrium markedly increases - innocent guys facing testing times stoically. Printers start getting busy and start failing due to overload. Frustrated groups of students hang around them checking their print jobs in the printer queue. IT Services guys start getting d-looks from us. And then when finally the much awaited prints come out, it's a total mess figuring out who gave which print. Finally the right ones are assembled and we head towards the "blue dropbox" kept for submission of assignments. Sometimes they get jammed with an overload of assignments too. Assignments, Speaker series, Events, Classes, Presentations."

The process of selection for elective courses is based on bidding system subject to the number of seats avaialble for the course. You bid for it and you get it if you have bid well enough and if there are enough seats to accommodate you in the class for the course. Though this sounds a bit weird but it’s a fair procedure. The course selection and bidding for the elective terms is something you will understand more when you are at the warfront here to experience it. True to the spirit of free markets the course allocation for the elective terms takes place through competitive bidding, each student is allotted a total of 4000 points which is the currency for bidding. In one of the current student's words "While term 5 bidding went over peacefully with most of the people getting the course they wanted and also getting them cheap, term 6 bidding proved to be a sharp contrast. The hottest course is “Corporate Controls, Mergers & Acquisitions”, almost the entire campus bid for the 165 available seats for the course, and true to expectations the cut off bid crossed 1000 points. Courses like “investing in private equity” and “pricing” also came close with the cutoff’s crossing 500. Some are worried they have spent all points they had, while some are disappointed they didn’t spend enough… call it the play of demand and supply or just exorbitant exuberance… its still by far the most efficient way of allocating scarce course seats….. that’s free markets in action".

Some of the major electives offered by ISB are Branding, International Finance, IT Strategy and Economics, Pricing, Sales management, Consumer Behaviour, Corporate Control M & A, Financial Statement Analysis, Investing in Private Equity, Marketing Research, Advertising, Corporate Risk Management, IT Services Project Management, Marketing Strategy and economic analysis, Global Issues in IT management, Indian Financial system, Managing Strategic Partnerships, New Product Development and Retail Marketing……

You have a course by name "Planning an Entrepreneurial Venture". It’s more of hands on than a classroom course. You have to form groups of 2-3, then bring up an idea and start working towards it. This would involve most of the course that you have been taught till then. You would have to do a market analysis for the segment you are targeting and then draw some figures from it to show the idea's viability.

You have lots of round table discussions. Assignments of many courses are time consuming and they take lot of your energy. As many of alumni said, most of the times you get 4 to 5 hours to sleep. You have Class Particpation for which some of the course have marks as well for CP.

In November I attended Healthcare and Pharma Summit. In the introductory lecture by the Dean, Ranga Rao, he said that the entire arrangements for the summit have been made by the current students. He also said that it took almost one month preperation before the summit could start.

I read in some of the ISB blogs that some people play games like tennis at 2:00 am in the morning. I should say, based on the experiences of Alum and current students, that most of them were not sure where to go?" and only at the end of Term 6 that they would be very clear and sink in that "this is it".. "this is where I need to go"..

The academic rigour and curriculum - 2

Continuing the discussion on curriculum.....

There are many simulation excercises during the course. Markstrat is one such computer simulation environment in which many firms will compete to maximize their profits. You will be using this software as part of the advanced Marketing course. The entire batch is split into groups of 4 or 5 and 18 "parallel" play industries will be created. Five firms A, E, I, O and U compete in each of these parallel worlds. Each firm holds a different market position like in a real world. One will be a market leader, one will be a close second, one might be a player catering to a niche requirement, etc. The particiating groups compete over a period of 8 years. At the beginning of each year you are expected to make a marketing decision and you will see the result of your decisions (w.r.t. those made by your opponents) at the end of the year. Various factors are in your control. You can invest in R&D, you decide how much to produce, you control inventory levels, you control the distribution channel, etc. Many current ISB students said that the Markstrat has been the most interesting they have done so far at this School.

further, the schedules are so planned that you do not get used to a particular timing of classes, thus while you may have a morning schedule in term 1, the timings for term-2 may be in the afternoons and you may be back to a morning schedule next term. At first glance, the courses for most of the terms look pretty quant heavy, the general perception is that IIT guys would find it pretty easy while the rest would have to work a bit harder.

You have various clubs. The one of the major club in ISB is the consulting club which conducts panel discussions, speaker series. The alumni students also participate in the discussions of the club. Typically, the alumni share mainly on subjects like a consultant’s typical day etc. Most of the alumni, who took placements in consultancy, emphasized that though consulting careers give you a great opportunity to constantly learn, innovate and challenge yourself, it’s a tough job at the end of the day and you need to be one up always to succeed. Further, it was clearly mentioned that consultants had to travel a lot and keep away from their base offices for long periods adding to the challenges of the job.

For the current Class of 2007, ISB has done away with interviews for selecting candidates for exchange programme, instead the bidding system has been extended to exchange selection as well. The bidding system is commonly used across b-schools to allocate elective courses. Each student is alloted a fixed quota of bidding points that can be used to bid for courses and now also the exchange programme. The ones bidding the highest are selected for the course. As was expected the bids for the exchange programme reached some very high levels with people bidding almost all the available points to the exchange programme.

One of the current student said "The only shortcoming with exchange in a one year course is that the exchange period typically includes the placement period, which would mean that you might not be able to participate in the campus placement process. Although, last year some of the students did travel back to India during the placement period , but it still is viewed as a risk by most since whether you can come back or not also depends on the schedule of exams etc at the school. Having said that being on a foreign campus is also a once in a lifetime experience.... life's full of choices, heard about tradeoffs...."

Enjoy the journey called ISB.

The academic rigour and curriculum - 1

After reading various blogs, online resources and interaction with some of the students of Class of 2007 at ISB, I summarise the academic rigour at this prestigious school.

The students have a busy year, and are involved in

1) Exchanging programmes with the associate schools,
2) International collaborative projects such as the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum, Innovative Challenge etc.
3) Real time learning through the Experiential Learning Programme,

4) Several other activities that give them opportunities to explore their areas of interest.
5) Conferences and panel discussions on topical subjects are a regular feature on campus, and the students lead most of these initiatives.

6) Exercises, simulations, cases and conceptual models to become more effective both as team members and as leaders.
7) Extensive interaction with achievers from various walks of life who are invited to participate in the ISB Speaker Series.

ISB mainly teaches in Accounting, Marketing, Economics & Public Policy, Entrepreneurship, Organisational Behaviour, Operations, Finance, Strategy and Information Systems, with many more electives to choose from.

The curriculum of international standard to be taught in a span of one year makes the course tough and energy consuming, mentally and physically. The course has 8 terms spanning a period of one year. Each term at ISB is just six weeks with exams almost every two and a half weeks (mid terms and then the final term exam). Between two terms, you may get breaks. But, the feedback I got from the current students is that these holidays are also mostly used for studying or preparing for projects etc. Till Term 4, all the sections attend classes together. First four terms are called core terms.

The first week is dedicated entirely to the induction, called Orientation Week, wherein the alumni from the previous batch turn out in large numbers to interact with the current batch and organise a large number of sessions around various club activities, their experience during placements and life at ISB in general. Then, there are week long modules known as pre terms. These are designed to acquaint you of the basic concepts to be applied during the core terms. There are three courses on offer (Quant, Stats and Accounting).

Time is the most precious commodity at ISB. There is so much to do and so many avenues and forums that one has to carefully choose what all he wants to be involved into. Perhaps everyone of the 400 and odd students have had a creditable past but what might differentiate them at the end of the year would be the way they manage 24 hrs in each day. Many people realise after spending first few weeks on campus that one needs to maintain a strong focus. You have 400+ friends around, innumerable student clubs, numerous other activities and a few classes and group activities in between, but just a year on hand.

You have pre-read every day before the class starts. You will be given a hand out running into sometimes 100 pages, which has to be read and understood so that whatever is taught in the class is digested. Somebody on his blog told that around 100 pages for marketing class, 100 odd for economics et all. For example, I have attended a class on Corporate Finance by Prof. Bhagwan Chowdhry in October, 2006. In a span of two-three hours, three topics of Corporate Finance - debt vs. equity, IPOs and Mergers & Acquistions were covered. Being from taxation background, fortunately, I could understand the jargon used except one term, beta, which I came to know later on. The experience of this class itself shows me that the pre-reads have to be taken very seriously. Class Participation(CP) is a big deal in B-School. There are special points (which count for the final grade) usually alloted for "Relevant, direction changing" (insightful) CPs. Sometimes these points can account for about 40% of one's grade in a course.

A conventional two year MBA format offers a period of internship where students work and learn on the job, with a one year MBA model there’s no time window available for a full time internship. The Experiential Learning Program is a way around, this is a short term project where teams work remotely for most of the project and spend a short time at the client location.

The exams conducted in middle of a term and at the end of each term may be a open book or closed book. In a closed book one however you are allowed to carry a single page of notes to the exam, that’s a cheat sheet in ISB parlance. In the open book exam, you are allowed to carry any amount of books, notes etc to the exam centre. Well honestly, as many students of Class of 2007 admitted, none can help, if you have not prepared well.

You have big events like TiE - ISB Connect, where delegates from different industries come and share their knowledge with you. The TiE-ISB Connect is a joint initiative of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), Hyderabad Chapter and the Centre for Entrepreneurship at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. It is a forum that brings together early stage venture capitalists, start up and growth stage entrepreneurs and academicians, on a common platform to interact and help build successful enterprises. Then the panelists from these industries also speak on these occasions. The main highlight of the event would be the presentation of the business plans to the Venture Capitalists. This year they have discussed trends and opportunities in Media Opportunities (Advertising), Media and Entertainment sector, Retail Sector, Bio-Pharma & Life Sciences Sector, Internet and Internet Services Sector, Sports and Fitness Sector, Real Estate and Infrastructure Sector, Technology Sector, Semiconductor Sector (Embedded Systems), IT and IT Enabled Services (ITES),

ISBians also participate in international competitions like Innovation Challenge. When you compete in the 2006 Innovation Challenge hosted by the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, you'll participate in the world's largest MBA innovation competition. You'll help solve real-world business challenges for top-tier global brands and join an unrivaled global innovation community in pursuit of the $20,000 grand prize and the title of "Most Innovative MBA Team in The World." Out of the record-breaking 440 teams from 88 universities in 15 countries enrolled in the 2006 Innovation Challenge, the Top 10 teams overall have been decided. 42 teams of ISB participated in the competition.

In term-1, the courses taught were :-

1. Financial Accounting

2. Marketing Management

3. Managerial Economics

4. Statistical methods for making decisions.

In Term 4, they had 4 courses and they go as follows:

1. Management of Organizations

2. Investment Analysis

3. Strategic Analysis of Information Technology

4. Government, Society and Business

Keep watching this blog. I will discuss the life at ISB threadbarely in a series of my postings.