Indian Institute of Technology Madras to re-define managemet studies in digital era

The focus of the conclave was on the disruptions occurring in the digital era, which bring about a paradigm shift in workplaces. To meet the new demands raised by such challenges, management education needs to be re-engineered.

The conclave was conceived to think through on how industry and academia can get together to co-create and redefine management education in the digital era.

The head of Management Studies department, professor L Prakash Sai said business schools are facing existential crisis owing to cataclysmic forces, ranging from digitalisation to disruption, invading industries and institutions. 

“While the new millennial workforce wishes to pursue boundary less and protean careers, institutions imparting management education need to re-examine the curricula and reinvent their own business models,” he said adding, “It is in this context that the department of Management Studies, IIT Madras, is bringing academic and industry together to deliberate on emerging business imperatives and technological trends - be it Internet of Things (IOT), cloud computing, machine learning or predictive analytics that have a bearing on management thought and practice.”

According to him, the last few years have witnessed sweeping changes in business environments. Advances in, and adoption of, technology has resulted in a significant shift of business operations towards the digital space. 

He said this has important implications for a wide range of models and functions – shared economy, cloud computing, digital marketing, and data science to name a few. In this context, it is hyper-relevant that management education undergoes commensurate changes. “Therefore, the conclave seeks to be a step towards the effective realization of such a change,” he said.

Some of the important points highlighted in the conclave include putting emphasis on business knowledge and business decision making and making courses more experiential, co-creating course content with corporations to ensure that learning is more application based.