S P Jain wins international TeamMBA award

After more than 21,000 votes were cast online in May, two business schools ― SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (India) and the College of William and Mary Mason School of Business (United States)―won TeamMBA awards for their community service and social responsibility programs. The winners were announced today by the Graduate Management Admission Council at its Annual Conference, the largest gathering of graduate business school professionals in the world.

A total of 78 service programs from schools around the world were considered for the TeamMBA award. These programs involved nearly 1,500 students who volunteered almost 50,000 hours and raised US$2.6 million.

“In honoring these two great institutions, we  also recognize the tremendous spirit and passion that business school students around the world have for giving back to their community and to their commitment to improving the lives of others,” said Dave Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC. “These are challenging times for many people all over the world and to see the effort that these students are putting in to making a difference is truly remarkable. Today's MBAs and other graduate business students fiercely embrace their obligation to give back and make the world a better place.”

SP Jain won the All School Award, which recognizes a school for its commitment to promoting and supporting social engagement by its students through school-led programs, services, institutional culture and community outreach. Through more than a dozen individual, team and school-wide projects, students at SP Jain worked to improve the lives of women, milk and agricultural growers, disaster victims and rural villagers.

The College of William and Mary Mason School of Business won the All Service Award, which recognizes outstanding projects in categories such as community service, sustainability/greening and consulting, for engaging in a variety of projects, including a mustache auction to raise money to start a microlending account, two blood drives that collected 100 pints of blood, and raising tens of thousands of dollars for local and global charities.

Mumbai campus for Italian b-school

One of Italy’s top institutes, Università Bocconi, through SDA Bocconi School of Management, is setting up a campus in Mumbai. The MISB Bocconi or the Mumbai International School of Business Bocconi will offer postgraduate programmes in business for Indian students and managers. SDA Bocconi has been ranked as among the top 10 European business schools according to the Financial Times rankings.

“MISB Bocconi opens to our university a new path for our internationalisation strategy which has led us today to have over 200 partner schools in all five continents and to offer our students 16 double degree programmes, of which one with the Indian Institute of Management- Ahmedabad,” explains Guido Tabellini, rector of Università Bocconi.

“It is, in fact, the first initiative in which, together with entrepreneurial partners, we give birth to a postgraduate education programme aimed exclusively at Indian students and managers and not Italians. We have chosen India,” says Tabellini, “ to set up this new project because of both the strong request for managerial education which characterises the Indian market and the deep-rooted experience which Bocconi has in this country beginning back in 2000, when we signed our first agreement with a partner university.”

The first programme offered by MISB Bocconi will be the Post Graduate Programme in Business, which will start in July 2012, a high-level international programme in management and centered on the realities of the Indian market and business world. Lessons will be held by a mix of Indian, international and Bocconi faculty. The programme will be a combination of theory and real practice in close contact with the business world and will be articulated in 2 modules of 11 months each. 

The first module will cover disciplines such as marketing, economics, corporate strategy and finance, concluding with a summer project that foresees an internship, an entrepreneurial project or a research project. The second module will also include the option of a campus abroad in a Bocconi partner school or an exchange semester at Bocconi’s campus in Milan and a group consultancy project in close collaboration with a company.

Università Bocconi will guarantee the quality of the courses in accordance with international academic standards and also draw upon its network of collaborations with Indian corporate partners with which it already works to offer internships and work experience for its students.

The school is also looking at launching executive education programmes for Indian and multinational companies, operating on the Indian market, in fields such as finance, entrepreneurship and family business, and fashion/design management, drawing upon the experience of SDA Bocconi.