BITS Pilani, the education arm of the Aditya Birla group, is venturing into management education with an investment of ₹1,500 crore to set up a new business school in Mumbai.
The new school, BITS School of Management, will offer a residential MBA degree. Initially, the institute will have 120 seats in the first batch starting this July. The campus will spring up on a 60-acre plot at Powai in Mumbai. The fees for the two-year MBA course would be about ₹24 lakh. The full-fledged school will be built at Kalyan on the outskirts of Mumbai by 2024.
Preparing future leaders
BITSoM will engage globally renowned professors from top B-Schools such as NYU Stern School of Business, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Singapore Management University and Kellogg School of Management, in addition to leading industry practitioners. The Governing Council, which will be responsible for providing strategic direction to BITSoM, will be led by Kumar Mangalam Birla.
Further, students will have access to the BITS Pilani alumni network — including over 3,000 CEOs of leading Indian and multinational companies. Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chancellor, BITS Pilani, said in a world marked by uncertainty, it is time to introduce a new way of thinking and prepare young leaders for this age of disruption.
Building on the legacy of BITS Pilani, BITSoM will go beyond management studies to mould visionary game-changers through a new age MBA degree. The endeavour is not just to redefine management education, but also help articulate the role of business in society, he said.
Holistic curriculum
The two-year MBA programme will infuse the fundamentals of business including marketing, finance and strategy along with relevant future-focused courses on emerging technology, design thinking and data analytics. It will provide distinctive specialisations in entrepreneurship and innovation, e-commerce and digital leadership (a first amongst top global schools), finance and investments, leadership and strategy, and marketing and consumer insights.
Ranjan Banerjee, Dean-designate, BITS SoM
Ranjan Banerjee, Dean-designate, BITSoM, told BusinessLine that the selection process for admission would be different as it would not only include academic qualifications but also students' extra-curricular interests and proficiencies. He will step down as Dean of SPJIMR at the end of this academic year (March end, 2021) and take up his new assignment.
The school is targeting a more diverse student profile in terms of undergraduate backgrounds (this implies a lower proportion of engineers than other top schools). The curriculum, being devised for contemporary times, will appeal to both the left and right brain with a strong focus on critical thinking, design thinking and emerging technologies, and analytics, said Banerjee.