IIT-Kharagpur bags 3rd spot in management research ranking

KOLKATA: The older and bigger IITs, including the one at Kharagpur, are celebrating. The QS Subject Ranking 2019 for Business and Management Studies has just been published for management research and the IIT B-schools have bagged ranks among the top five positions. IIT-Powai, IIT-Delhi, IIT-Kharagpur and IIT-Madras have secured the second and third positions beating IIMs Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Calcutta.

IIM-Bangalore, however, remained on top. The second position has been jointly shared by IIT-Powai and IIT-Delhi while the third position was shared by IITs Kharagpur and Madras, along with the Indian School of Business and the B-school of Delhi University.

IIMs Ahmedabad and Lucknow come into the picture in the fifth position after IIT-Kanpur, which has finished fourth. IIM-Calcutta has managed a slot in the seventh position along with IISc, after IIT-Roorkee in the sixth position.

The stellar rank has coincided with the silver jubilee celebrations of Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSoM), the business school of IIT-Kharagpur. The QS World University Rankings rates the world’s top universities in individual subject areas covering 48 subjects. The rankings aim to help prospective students identify the leading schools in their chosen field.

The ranking data is compiled based on QS’s global surveys of academics and employers and since this time the rankings were based on the quality of management research done in B-schools, the survey sourced research citations data from Elsevier’s Scopus. The parameters included citations per research paper and the impact of the research in a particular subject area vis a vis the relevance of the subject area.

VGSoM, which was seed funded by IIT-Kharagpur alumnus Vinod Gupta, focuses on several multi-disciplinary areas of research and collaborative projects. On an average, the 25 faculty members of VGSoM annually publish 75 papers on case studies in peer reviewed international journals. The school is backed by the interdisciplinary engineering, science and mathematics platforms of IIT-Kharagpur, which present a unique opportunity to its students to pursue electives in a variety of management areas.

“Our students are from tech backgrounds and hence they pursue areas related to technology management. Keeping in line with the industry needs, we have introduced many electives in the business analytics area. We have recently introduced a micro-credit course in “personalization in retail”, which caters to the changing scenario in e-commerce. Similarly, we have introduced another micro-credit course on “alternative investment and portfolio management” complementing the strength of the school in financial analytics,” said Prabina Rajib, dean of VGSoM.

These courses are delivered by industry experts.

Every year, 120 students graduate from VGSoM and are immediately absorbed by the industry in the areas of operations, consulting, analytics, sales, marketing and financial domains.