BIMTECH's Prof Dhruva Chak Conducts Lectures In UK

Online, April 1, 2012 (Newswire.com) - Prof Dhruva Chak, BIMTECH's Area Head (Marketing), visited University of Hertfordshire Business School (UH),Hatfield, U.K. He was part of a collaborative project between 200 plus UH BBA students and 86 of BIMTECH's PGDM Marketing students.

Funded by a grant to UH, Prof Dhruva Chak's visit to UK was an effort to explore the possibility of launching new services in India.

He found the experience and experiment to be really useful. It put things in perspective for both institutes. "I don't think either BIMTECH or the University of Hertfordshire have done an experiment of this scale," Prof Chak says. The scale he is talking about involved the rather huge number of 300 plus people, including professors. Student wise, there were 86 from BIMTECH and 200 from UH.

As these services are proposed to be launched in India, BIMTECH students researched on them. Prof Chak, on the first day of his visit, spoke of the Challenges and Opportunities in Launching a New Service in India. Across 3 days he met with 43 tutorial groups of five students each. Along with their professors he discussed collaborative projects they are undertaking with their BIMTECH counterparts. "It is hoped that the project would result in some selected services actually being launched through some investors in Britain," Prof Chak explains.

The size of each team was seven students with five from UH and two from BIMTECH. "The UH students were not really aware of our Indian environment, just as we were not aware of theirs," he observes. This resulted in a few first-step challenges. One was cultural differences. The second - awry schedules due to the time differences between the two countries. It all worked out in the end with students and professors finding common ground to make this project feasible in the long run. "There was a lot of learning for the students as well as for us," he says. "It is not very easy to get these kinds of numbers to agree on projects. And we were talking about 43 different projects - a very major exercise."

Prof Chak thinks the future of such collaborative projects is bright. He foresees an exchange of students and faculty with UH Business School. However he observes, "There could be a better balance in the number of students involved on either side. They had five students and we had two. In future, they may reduce the numbers of students involved in the project to make it more focused and more controlled."

On his return, Prof Dhruva Chak carries home memories of interested students wanting to know more about the real India, in terms of both business opportunities and culture.