India’s Best B-schools: New-age institutes turn disruptors with their hands-on approach

IMAGINE AMAN GUPTA (boAt), Deepinder Goyal (Zomato) or Abhiraj Singh Bhal (Urban Company) — the poster boys of the startup world — coming to your campus not for a one-off guest lecture, but to teach you the intricacies of managing supply chain in quick commerce, or how to come up with differentiated marketing strategies for multiple cohorts of consumers, for an entire semester! For Tanay Agarwal, it was a no-brainer to enrol himself in the one-year MBA in StartUp Management programme of the Mesa School of Business, Bengaluru, which promised to get him mentored by startup founders. It had always been Tanay’s dream to run a startup and soon after finishing his undergrad course, he thought the best way to learn the ropes would be to work in startups. He spent a year with CRED and Kristal.AI, before joining Mesa. Not only was he taught by the likes of Vidit Atrey (Meesho), Kunal Shah (CRED) and Bhal (Urban Company), Tanay and fellow co-founder Jash Arora (a classmate) incubated Mumbai Pav Co. at the school’s startup lab. Today, Mumbai Pav Co. is already a year old and has five stores in Bengaluru. “Some of my industry mentors at the Mesa School also invested in my business,” says Tanay. Up north, in Gurugram, Archit Bhargava always wanted to be a part of a venture fund. He had worked with brokerages and consulting firms, until he joined the PGP in Tech and Business Management course at Masters’ Union, Gurugram. It was Archit’s dream come true to be mentored by stalwarts of the venture capital world, including Saksham Kotiya of DSG Consumer Partners and Shishir Maheshwari of Eversource Capital. A practical experiment followed when he was assigned to lead the student-managed Masters Union Investment Fund. Today, Archit is part of the investment team of Avaana Capital, and his intent is to have his own venture firm someday. Masters’ Union, Mesa School of Business, Scaler School of Business, and BitSoM (BITS School of Management) are disrupting business school education, at a time when the relevance of B-school education itself is being questioned in India. These schools have been around for less than five years and are claiming placement salaries equivalent to leading IIMs. For instance, Masters’ Union, in its placement report for 2025, has said that its annual compensation touched ₹1.28 crore, with four students breaching the ₹1-crore mark. The average paycheques are in the range of ₹33.39 lakh. “Zomato has hired 30 students from our campus this year,” says Pratham Mittal, founder, Masters’ Union. So, what are these new-age business schools doing differently? Their premise is clear: India needs more job creators than job seekers and their entrepreneur-led programmes, they claim, groom the country’s future job creators. Around 20-30% of students of all these schools end up starting their own venture. The rest join new-age and legacy businesses. “Around 10 lakh (1 million) people work in startups, but there is no college that says I will give you a MBA or BBA in startup marketing, or startup finance. That’s where we felt we could make a difference,” says Ankit Agarwal, co-founder, Mesa School of Business. An IIT Mumbai graduate, Agarwal himself has run startups, and worked in unicorns such as Urban Company. Hands-on Experience The industry’s biggest complaint today is that B-school curriculum is outdated. Students mostly have theoretical, textbook knowledge, which doesn’t work in this age of continuous disruptions. “It’s no longer good just to teach business, [the question is] can you help students experience real businesses, whether it is through practitioners, live projects or venture studios? You need to incorporate experience-led programmes into the curriculum and build much deeper immersions,” says Vivek Gambhir, venture partner, Lightspeed India. To ensure students get first-hand experience of what is actually happening in the world of business, collaboration with the industry is a must, a missing factor in most business schools. By getting founder-entrepreneurs as well as heads of venture funds and consulting companies to teach the students, the new-age schools have altered the equation considerably. Mittal of Masters’ Union says his students spend more time in the industry than in classrooms. “Every semester they have to build a business. In the first semester, they have to build an e-commerce business, sell on Amazon, Flipkart, or Meesho. Their grades largely [depend] on the revenues and margins that they make through that business. In semester two, they have to build a YouTube channel and monetise that channel and their grades come from brand partnerships, views, and engagements. In the third semester they have to build a cloud kitchen and sell on Zomato or Swiggy and their grades come from customer satisfaction and the margins they make.” Similarly, Mesa School of Business collaborates with startups to involve its students to come up with solutions for some of the firms’ ongoing challenges. Agarwal cites the example of partnering with a wellness firm to solve the problem of the latter’s Instagram account not scaling fast. “Students are figuring out how we can use artificial intelligence (AI) to create an engine to recommend and come up with relevant content,” explains Agarwal. Students build at least two-three real businesses during their time at Mesa, understanding nuances like picking a market, negotiating with suppliers, building brand and distribution, and most importantly, sales. “Academic inputs just in the form of theocratical classes are replaced by case-based and discussion-driven real world problem-solving, guided by top professors from IIM, ISB, Kellogg, Harvard,” adds Varun Limaye, co-founder, Mesa School of Business. Similarily, BITSoM’s MBA programme is all about building future-ready managers, who are AI-ready as well. The fact that AI is changing the dynamics of business is a given. “There will be a sea change in activities,” points out Sarvanan Kesavan, dean, BITSoM. “In the supply chain context, for instance, you typically have people in the organisation who deal with vendors, and negotiate and figure out where to source the products from. In the AI era, instead of having people negotiate with vendors and place orders, there will be AI agents who are going to do these tasks. The likes of Walmart are already doing it in the U.S…. what that means is people will lose jobs, but what it also means is that there will be a new crop of people who understand how this technology works and help organisations move forward,” he adds. Kesavan claims every student graduating from BITSoM will have the know-how of latest technologies and, more importantly, understand how technology impacts the workforce. The focus is on learning by collaborating with industry. “We have 18 AI projects that companies have come up with. By the time students join their workplaces, they have not only understood the theory behind AI, they have also understood the messiness of the real world [by] their exposure to it.” For Scaler, almost 90% of the faculty is from the industry. According to co-founder Abhimanyu Saxena, these industry veterans don’t teach theory, but start with the problem. “For instance, we got the founder of Mokobara to give a brand problem to our students. He told them the brand didn’t have good enough recall in South India and asked them to solve the problem. The students were given a week or two to do research and come up with a thesis, do a few experiments and show the results. Mokobora’s head of marketing reviewed the researches, selected a few strategies and implemented them. Within a few weeks the students got to see which strategy led to better sales and which didn’t work.” The Faculty Why did Tanay of Mumbai Pav Co. or Archit of Avaana Capital not opt for an IIM or SPJIMR, and choose startup schools that are not even five years old? With a fee structure of ₹28-30 lakh for a one-year programme, these schools are more expensive than IIMs. Their response, surprisingly, is instant — it’s their application-based pedagogy, putting students in real-life situations versus relying a lot more on classes and case study discussions, are factors that appeal. The whole idea of being taught by industry professionals has definitely been the catch. In fact, almost all these schools refer to their faculty as mentors and not teachers. Around 70-80% of the faculty includes industry professionals or professors of global universities, but not on a permanent basis. “You have to bring in more practitioners to teach. If you only bring in, [say] PhD faculty, it has never helped the school or industry. They teach theoretical frameworks. which can never be used in real life. Practitioners will teach what they recruit for,” explains Mittal of Masters’ Union. “Over 90% of the courses we teach are taught by faculty visiting us from the U.S., Europe, Singapore, and India. This gives us a structural advantage, as we can pick and choose faculty members who are at the cutting edge of AI,” adds BITSoM’s Kesavan. Going forward, the intent is to increase the percentage of permanent faculty. While Masters’ Union’s current set of permanent faculty comprises younger PhDs from the IIMs, the plan is to have younger members with deeper involvement with industry. “We want to increase our resident faculty, who will not only teach, but also do research in areas that are relevant,” says Kesavan of BITSoM. The Debate Having a high NIRF (The National Institutional Ranking Framework) rank does matter for a business school to attract the best of students as well as recruiters. Most of these new-age B-schools are less than five years old, and hence, don’t qualify to be a part of the rankings list. But the big question is, can they afford not to be a part of the NIRF list in the long run? A key component of NIRF rankings is research and none of these schools are research focussed. According to Bharat Bhasker, director, IIM Ahmedabad, new-age business schools are a welcome addition to the education ecosystem, but he isn’t too sure if the model can be scaled in the long run. He also believes that getting a student ready for a startup role or making him/her proficient only in AI and digital marketing could take attention away from the larger goal of building leaders of the future. Bhasker says new-age schools are putting students on steroids. “When you put them on steroids their body is ready to take the job for which they are being trained for. If I am a digital marketing person and have imbibed all that is needed to be a good digital marketer, I may be a good fit for a firm in the short term, but in the long term that skill may get outdated. We are building healthy bodies, which will survive in all kinds of environment,” he adds. Varun Nagaraj, dean, SPJIMR, doesn’t think too differently either. “If a Masters’ Union or Mesa School of Business says we will not compete on research, have more people from industry and focus on live practical experiences, I think it’s a good addition. We need schools like that. It will work for certain students as they learn much better with hands-on work. But does that mean I will abandon my PGDM programme? Certainly not.” New-age school founders argue that when a consulting firm, a bank or an FMCG company comes to their school to hire, they look for attributes such as quick decision-making, ability to find a way amidst ambiguities, and the appetite to fail and learn from those failures. The nature of the training given to students helps them imbibe all those traits. “Most of our students aspire to be entrepreneurs, but only 30% manage to incubate their ventures successfully. A failed entrepreneur always makes for a great manager,” argues Mittal of Masters’ Union. “A 50-year-old curriculum is replaced by a new-age one with topics such as product management, growth marketing, sales, venture capital etc. It [the new-age curriculum] makes sure students are equipped with the exact skills valuable in the workforce today,” adds Limaye of Mesa School of Business. Will these new-age business schools be able to rub shoulders with the IIMs and other leading B-schools of the country? We will wait and watch.

India’s Best B-schools: New-age institutes turn disruptors with their hands-on approach

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