For the first time
in three years, IIM Ahmedabad will be adding 12 more research chairs backed by
donors like Infosys, ICICI Bank, Edelweiss, PwC, SAP and Crisil, among others.
The B-school has raised around Rs 35 crore for these research chairs which will
be set up in areas such as corporate governance, macroeconomics, societal
development, finance and management, among others.
While the institute
has announced three research chairs so far, including Nabard Chair in
Agribusiness, RBI Chair in Finance & Economics and JSW Chair in Innovation
& Public Policy, Ashish Nanda, director of IIM Ahmedabad said that the
premier B-school will be announcing 12 more going further.
The 12 research
chairs to be announced by IIM-A include Edelweiss Chair in Finance, Infosys
Foundation Chair in Societal Development, PwC Chair in Financial Reporting
& Corporate Governance, UTI Chair in Macroeconomics, ATS Chair in Housing
& Infrastructure Management, Chandrika Tandon Chair in Leadership, Crisil
Chair in Financial Markets, ICICI Chair in Strategic Management, Kasturbhai Lalbhai
Chair in Management, Prof. MN Vora Chair in Marketing & Entrepreneurship,
Reliance Capital Chair in Marketing, and SAP Chair in Social Innovation.
According to Nanda,
the institute will be looking for faculty members to fill the chair positions
from both within and outside the campus.
"We invite
nominations both internally and externally. There is an external committee
which looks at nominations and suggests name. Then the internal committee looks
at the shortlists. And in the end we identify the chairs," Nanda said.
Having identified areas of research chairs and raised funds from donors, IIM-A
is now working on identifying "high quality" people to head the same.
The institute not
only hopes these chairs will boost more research work among faculty peers
within the institute but also attract quality talent from outside.
"The chairs
are meant to honour faculty who are doing cutting edge work in research,
teaching as well as course development, and engagement with practice and
policy. We hope these chairs will create a feeling of enthusiasm within the
faculty community to reach their potential. We hope that these chairs will also
encourage people to consider this institute as a place to come to as an
academic. It might help us in recruitment. It is early days just now for us,
though," Nanda added.
While the Nabard
Chair in Agribusiness is being chaired by IIM-A faculty member Vasant Gandhi,
the RBI Chair in Finance and Economics is headed by Abhiman Das. Recently,
faculty member Rakesh Basant took charge of the JSW Chair in Innovation and
Public Policy.
Commenting on the
future plans of the JSW Chair in Innovation and Public Policy, Basant said that
qualitative research work on analysing R&D spend in private organisations
would be attempted under the chair.