The Centre for Analytical Finance (CAF) at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad hosted a symposium on SME Financing Challenges in Mumbai this month. Since SMEs are considered the engines of growth in a developing economy, this issue is vital for the Indian economy. The event included two very engaging panel discussions on improving banking credit and finding alternate sources of funding. Panelists included bankers such as SS Mundra, Executive Director, Union Bank of India and SS Kohli, Director, Infrastructure Development Finance Company Ltd (IDFC); financial regulators such as V K Agarwal, President, Federation of Indian Small and Micro Enterprises (FISME), and financial expert Usha Thorat, Director, CAFRAL and ex-Deputy Governor, RBI. For more information on CAF, please click here.
CEE has established a new Executive Education relationship with Gammon India, a leading Engineering & Construction company. The “Gammon Executive Management Programme” is a first of its kind Leadership Development Programme in the Indian construction industry. The participants are from Gammon’s Senior Management Group, which reports to the Board of Management of Gammon India. The programme will run until April 2013, and will have six phases of classroom sessions at ISB of one week each (one phase per quarter). Participants are exposed to various facets of Management and Leadership during the programme, interspersed with “Action Learning Projects” between each phase in order to apply their learnings to real workplace issues. They will also be assessed for their potential to take up senior leadership roles in Gammon, as part of the intervention.
“Artha,” ISB’s annual Finance conclave was held on campus on November 11-12, 2011. Organised by the Finance Club at ISB, this year’s theme was “Radical Today, Real Tomorrow.” There were various speaker sessions and panel discussions that exposed students to the latest trends and best practices in the industry. One of the issues the panelists stressed upon was the importance of conducting thorough research before buying a company’s stock as it was not sufficient to simply rely on popular analyst reports. Investors need not take high risks to get high returns and understanding the company’s business and its core competencies can help minimise risk exposure. Amongst the prominent speakers at the conclave were Raamdeo Agrawal, Joint Managing Director, Motilal Oswal Securities Limited and Sunjoy Bhattacharya, CEO, Fortuna Capital. For more information on the Finance Club, please click here.
Dries Buytaert, Founder and Project Lead, Drupal and Co- founder and CTO, Acquia, visited ISB recently to address the packed Khemka auditorium of students and open-source enthusiasts. In his inspirational talk, Buytaert spoke about the journey that led him to developing Drupal, one of the leading open source-content management systems. Buytaert spoke about how he developed the concept for the collaborative platform to talk to his friends when he was in college. The idea matured as they continued to use this platform to exchange information even after graduating. Thus, began the concept of collaboration through communities. Drupal’s faith in its users was strengthened when they received an overwhelming response to their call for help on the web – with $10,000 collected in donations overnight, the company was prepared to meet its infrastructure requirements. Despite these initial setbacks, over 2% of websites currently use Drupal, making it the world’s leading content management system.
There are several professional clubs in ISB, which provide the PGP students with an opportunity to interact with the industry. For the first time, a student club at the ISB, the Infrastructure Club, has partnered with SREI Infrastructre Finance Ltd for a year. As part of this partnership, SREI will provide the guidance and mentorship to the club on several of their activities while also helping them connect with a broader group of infrastructure experts across the country. SREI will also help the club by exploring other industry learning avenues such as Experiential Learning Projects and Shadow-a-CEO in the PGP programme. This unique opportunity will help the club members enhance their learning from industry experts. The club also hopes to use this partnership to help other clubs’ activities in the same domain. For this period of the partnership, the club will be known as “SREI Infrastructure Club.” to know more about club, please click here.
Professor Harish Bijoor, Brand-Strategy Specialist & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc., was at the ISB to present to students the “New Paradigms for Breaking into Rural India.” In a very engaging session, he explained that it is wrong to say that rural markets are poor markets. “There is a lot of land-related money in the rural markets and as much as 83% of the rural economy is zero income tax-oriented. This means that if you are an agriculturalist, you pay zero tax,” he stated. This translates to more disposable income. However, he cautioned that the rural market needs to be understood with humility, through intelligent market research strategies. He believed that one of the problems is that marketers try to understand this segment through the lens of an urban-dweller and use urban norms and practices as a basis of their research, which is a flawed method.
ISB recently hosted the launch of “India Inside,” a book on the innovation landscape in India by Phanish Puranam, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School (LBS) and Nirmalya Kumar, Professor of Marketing, LBS. The authors embarked on their research after coming across a book which proposed that the West will continue to have a competitive advantage as they focus on the more sophisticated tasks such as creativity and innovation, while the less sophisticated tasks such as manufacturing, etc, will move to India and China. The authors wanted to understand whether “India can do for innovation what India has done for services.” They found that there is a lot of innovation happening in India, just that it is a different kind of innovation. Amongst the ideas they shared was that the innovations carried out in India are “invisible” as they are not branded or targeted to the end user, unlike the type of innovation that is carried out in the West.
ISB’s Finance Conclave Brings Latest Industry Insights
Drupal Co-founder Dries Buytaert Inspires ISB Students
Social Entrepreneurship Forum: A Resounding Success
ISB’s Infrastructure Club Partners With SREI Infrastructure
Harish Bijoor Shares his Perspective on Rural Marketing
ISB Hosts Talk on “India Inside” : An Emerging Innovation Challenge to the West