Chairman BoG's 47th Annual Convocation speech highlights Thought Leadership at IIMC
Thought Leadership at IIM Calcutta 2011-2012
IIM Calcutta Convocation Speech April 2nd 2012
Ajit Balakrishnan
This past year, our 50th, was a banner year for IIM Calcutta. Our PGP class was placed in 4 days flat, in the All India Management Association survey we were ranked as No. 1 among management schools and we added a quarter-million square feet to our class-rooms and hostel infrastructure.
But, while all that is gratifying, the real measure of an academic institution lies in the extent it contributes to thought leadership. I want to share with you today how we have fared in that area.
The journey of an intellectual idea often starts as a working paper or a case, evolves into a journal article then as a conference presentation, finally as a book chapter or even a book. In a vibrant thought leadership system each leg of this journey is important. During this past year our faculty produced nearly a hundred research papers. These were published as working papers, cases, or presented as conference papers, as articles in peer reviewed journals, or as book chapters.
You will find the full list of papers published by IIM Calcutta faculty in the folder that is with you but please allow me to whet your appetite by summarizing a few of these. I freely admit that the ones I have chosen to summarize are an idiosyncratic choice.
Let me start with a paper that deals with an issue that is life and death for modern businesses-the Supply Chain challenge. How do you as a business respond fast enough to the sudden increase or decrease in customer demand that is a feature of modern business life. If you respond too slowly you pay for the lost sales opportunity, if you respond too fast you may end up with excess inventory. Prof Rahul Roy of our MIS Group has mathematically modelled a Supply Chain as a management game for use as a teaching tool. The originality of this paper lies in the fact he has done this for items of inventory that are perishable. His paper, The Cake Game-comprehending perishability, was written together with a person from JDA, the leading supply chain platform provider which makes it doubly interesting. It was presented at the 15th Annual International Conference of the Society of Operations Management.
The second paper that I want to draw your attention to deals with a topic that dominates media headlines in India, the battle over telecom spectrum. Little thought has gone into the true underlying cause of this-the narrow definition of a slice of spectrum as being "owned" by each operator leaving some portions of spectrum idle and other portions hotly contested and every allocation decision being greeted by accusations of corruption. Professor Debasis Saha of our MIS group and Sadukhan of our Computer Centre have a paper that may bring some rationality to this world of smoke and mirrors. They devised an algorithm that dynamically allocates a common pool of spectrum using concepts from game theory. What is gratifying for me is that their paper, A Meta-heuristic based Fair Dynamic Spectrum Allocation Policy is written jointly with executives from BSNL and Wipro and scholars from Jadavpur University. Such cross-sector creative work is very exciting. It was presented at the IEEE 5th International Conference on Advanced Networks and Telecommunication Systems in December 2011.
The third paper that I’d like to draw your attention to today tackles the paradox of giant glitzy shopping malls in which our citizens window shop but only occasionally make a purchase. This phenomena has led this year to a crisis in the organized retail industry. Prof Rohit Varman paper could possibly explain why this happens. He it says that t for Indians, shopping malls are much more than places to efficiently buy things; they are, his words, "spectacles of Western-ness and…symbols of progress and development....a masquerade through which young consumers attempt to transform themselves and to disguise or temporarily transcend their Third World realities". His paper, Consuming Postcolonial Shopping Malls, was published in the international Journal of Marketing Management in February 2012.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers in New York and the cascading global financial crisis brought home the inter-connectedness of the world financial system. The worlds’ financial markets seem to be part of a giant international social network where a problem in one centre cascades into a world-wide financial crisis. Ram Roy a Fellowship student and Prof Utttam Sarkar used the mathematical techniques normally used in modelling social networks to to determine which international stock indices matter. Their paper was presented at the 2nd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies, in Ontario, Canada, September 2011.
We all appreciate in a general way that news events can make stock market prices respond in a volatile manner and many researchers have attempted to mathematically model these fluctuations. Prof Ashok Banerjee of our Finance and Control Group used high frequency firm-specific news as proxy for information flow and mathematically modelled the impact of news on volatility of stock returns in his paper, "Impact of information arrival on volatility of intraday stock returns". This paper is an early example of work from our Finance Lab, which as many of you know was singled out for mention by the Finance Minister in last year’s Union Budget with a grant of Rs 20 crores. The other aspect is that this work was done in collaboration with students at IIT Khargpur and people at The Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Optimisation Modelling, Brunel University, UK. Such inter-institutional collaborative work force-multiplies the quality and impact of academic research.
At this point I’d like to pause and demonstrate to you that IIM Calcutta faculty are not entirely preoccupied with esoteric mathematical models. Professors Bhaskar Chakrabarti and Raghabendra Chattapadhyay paper focuses on the high stakes endeavour of improving the management of our panchayats. Their study of what management systems work achieving co-ordination between panchayats and the line departments of government should be of interest to government administrators. This paper was published in The Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance, Nov 2011.
In another policy oriented paper, Professor Sudip Chaudhr looks at the impact of India switching from a process patent regime to a product patent regime in pharmaceuticals. You will recall that our Product Patent regime, that we had adopted in 1970 what what had given birth to the a large and vibrant pharma industry in India and also made drugs in India available at some of the cheapest prices in the world. Prof Sudip Chaudhri’s study points out that the switch back to the product patent regime has made large Indian pharmaceutical companies, who are the major R&D spenders in the country, focus on the larger and the more lucrative markets of the developed world. His work appears as a chapter, The Pharmaceutical Industry in India after TRIPS in the forthcoming book The New political Economy of Pharmaceuticals in the Global South by Palgrave Macmillan.
Many of our faculty members had engaged with the challenges and dilemmas of economic growth. Prof Mritiunjoy Mohanty examines why high rates of per capita income growth co-exists in India with rising unemployment as well as democratic contestation (presented at the University of Massachusetts Amherst May, 2011); Prof Amitava Bose examines the inflation- growth relationship in India in one paper and the reasons for intersectoral disparities in growth in another; Prof Manisha Chakrabarty examines what policies will enhance individuals’ capability to succeed in the labor market and improve their earnings; Sasanka Chanda and Prof Sougata Ray examine whether developmental programs, microcredit and Gandhian innovation can be pillars of a bottom of pyramid strategy, Nimruji Jammulamadaka examines the adhocism in microfinance policy formulation and in another paper the conflict between tribals and mining interests in Orissa; Bhaskar Chakrabarti studies the contested identity of Junglemahal Maoists; Suman Nath and Bhaskar Chakrabarti provide a fascinating account of the Political Economy of Potato Cold Storages in West Bengal; Annapurna Shaw studies the differential effect of the repeal in 1999 of the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act and published her paper in the Journal of Eurasian Geography and Economics.
As you know, we have a giant software services industry but not enough academic work on management issues in that industry. This past year saw a number of studies across different faculty groups at IIM Calcutta on this topic: what makes for optimal outsourcing contracts (Preetam Basu), what determines user involvement in software projects and another paper on the use of simulation to judge software requirements volatility (both by Rahul Roy), what makes for Agile software companies (Subir Bhattacharya), HR practices that possess option value in software companies (Prodip Seth); Explaining Sophistication in Collaborative Technology Use (Sanjiv Vaidya and Priya Seetharaman),
Our Finance and Control contributed a number of papers: three papers from Prof Rama Seth: the first on what determines bank risk exposure, the second on how Central Bank Target Rates affect Term Structure of Interest Rates and the third on foreign bank’s lending behaviour during recessions. There are also papers on how earnings management affects corporate governance (Manju Jaiswal), the use of neural networks to forecast one day stock volatility (BB Chakrabarty), using the real options method for investment decisions in the oil industry (Ashok Banerjee) and a paper on how to price telecom infrastructure in a monopolistic market (Ashok Banerjee).
The papers that I have recounted so far are just a few examples of the good work being done here at IIM Calcutta during this past year; please dip into the folder before you for the full list of nearly a hundred papers.
There is another aspect of our work at IIMC we are proud of and that relates to scholarly conferences that we host. The India Finance Conference in December, 2011, done jointly with IIM Bangalore, the 15th Annual International Conference of the Society of Operations Management, in December, 2011 and the conference on Management Education for A Sustainable Tomorrow, November, 2011 are some examples.
These conferences attract scholars from the leading management schools from around the world and we are justifiably proud of that.
But even more importantly these conferences provide a platform to stimulate scholarly work in the 3000+ management schools we have in India. As I remarked last year, when our nation’s leaders founded IIM Calcutta 50 years ago India was a very poor country that had problems in even feeding its population. Through those difficult early years government funded us in the hope that such public investments would trigger a qualitative change in the whole of management education in this country. Thus, I am glad that through our conferences we were able to trigger research papers from institutions as diverse as, Ramjas College, Delhi University, the Institute for Financial Management and Research Chennai, the Institute of Information Management & Technology, Aligarh, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, J&K, and even the North‐Eastern Hill University, Shillong, to name a few of the many dozens who have benefited. We take seriously our responsibility to help bring all these institutions to a world class level.
Finally, I am glad to report that the Ministry of Human Resources, Government of India, has requested IIM Calcutta to take the lead on organizing a world management conference. This conference, planned for later this year will hopefully do for IIMs and Indian management schools what the Literature Festival at Jaipur has done for Indian writing-put it on the map of must attend conferences in the world. We are grateful for being given this opportunity and are hard at work on it. I also hope that we will see many of you at that important event.
Thank you.
Alphabetical List of Contributors
Ambuj Mahanti
Cloud-based Health Management Systems
A Tale of Two Searches: Bidirectional Search Algorithm that Meets in the Middle
Artificial Immune System for detecting online credit card frauds
Collaborative preference elicitation based on dynamic peer recommendations
Ontology Based Multi Agent Modelling For Information Security
Amitava Bose
Inflation and Growth: Long Run Pulls
Intersectoral Disparities and Growth
Annapurna Shaw
Metropolitan City Growth and Management in Post-liberalized India
Anup Sen
Semantic Notions of Weakly Correct AND/XOR Business Workflows based on Partial Synchronization
Stochastic Greedy Algorithms A Learning-Based Approach to Combinatorial Optimization
Application of Graph Search and Genetic Algorithms for the Single Machine Scheduling Problem with Sequence-Dependent Setup Times and
Quadratic Penalty Function of completion times
Ashis Chatterjee
An improved mathematical programming formulation for multi-attribute choice behavior
Ashok Banerjee
Decision making framework for investments in oil industry: An application of Real Options
Impact of information arrival on volatility of intraday stock returns
Intelfra Ltd: Pricing Telecom Infrastructure in a Monopolistic Market.
B.B. Chakrabarti
Estimating Stock Index Volatility in India
B.N. Srivastava
Cooperation across cultures: An examination of the concept in 16 countries
Perception and Management of Time: Perspective from India
Individualism–collectivism and business context as predictors of behaviors in cross-national work settings: Incidence and outcomes
Bhaskar Chakrabarti
Contested Identity of Junglemahal Maoists: State Hegemony, Political Theatre and the Process of Alternate Representation
Local Governments in Rural West Bengal, India and their Coordination with Line Departments
Political Economy of Cold Storages in West Bengal
Bodhibrata Nag
A dynamic programming algorithm for optimal design and operation of tidal power plants
Determinants of profitability of US Class I Freight Railroads
Diesel Locomotive Fuelling Problem (LFP) in Railroad Operations (chapter 2)
Scheduling India’s General Elections
Chetan Joshi
Making a Case for an Often Unchartered Territory in Diversity Education: Teaching about Subtle Biases when Teaching About Diversity
Employment Discrimination : P-O FIT and P-J FIT as Rationalizations for acting out on prejudice
Debashis Saha
A Metaheuristic based Fair Dynamic Spectrum Allocation Policy
Split Reservation Protocols using Multiple Wavelengths (SRPM) in Dense WDM Optical Networks
Why NEMO Protocols Do Not Pre-fetch More Than One CoA?
Performance analysis of the CAC scheme CARETON under mixed cell environment in overlay networks
Debashish Bhattacharjee
Employment and Industrial Relations in India - Informality and Inequality
Labour Markets in India - Informality and Inequality
HRM Strategies and Trade Union Responses in the Indian Automobile Sector
Kaushiki Choudhury
Service quality and WOM (Word-Of-Mouth): A study of the Indian Banking Sector.
Manisha Chakrabarty
Earning Capacity, Efficiency and Poverty: A Study on Rural West Bengal and Orissa
Manju Jaiswall
Exploring the Relation between Earnings Management and Corporate Governance Characteristics in the Indian Context
Megha Sharma
Computing the probability mass function of the maximum flow through a reliable network
Mritiunjoy Mohanty
Globalisation and Growth in India: a political economy framework Completion Times
India: Growth, immiserisation and contestation
Nimruji Jammulamadaka
Microfinance in India: Promotional Policy or Fragmented Adhoc Reactions
Of Gods and Demons: The Sacred Hills of Niyamgiri and Vedanta Alumina
Nisigandha Bhuyan
An agenda for Corporate Social Responsibilities of MSMEs in India
Role of Integrative thinking in human Innovation and enterprising: Lessons from Ancient Indian Philosophy
Panduranga Bhatta
Addressing Human Issues: Experiences of Management Centre for Human Values (IIMC)
Religious Pluralism: Managing Diversityin a Globalised Corporate World.
Partha PriyaDatta
Analysis and evidence of bullwhip effect in Police Control Room Emergency Response Systems
Parthasarathi Dasgupta
Fast High-performance Algorithms for Multi-pin Droplet Routing in Digital Microfluidic Biochips
Crosstalk Aware Coupled Line Delay Tree Construction for On-chip Interconnects
A Group-Preferential Parallel-Routing Algorithm for Cross-referencing Digital Microfluidic Biochips
An Internet-based IP Protection Scheme for Circuit Designs using Linear Feedback Shift Register-based Locking
Prodip Seth
Applying HR Options to Manage Uncertainties: An Empirical Study
Prarthan Desai
Sustaining and Enhancing Internal Legitimacy of Alternate Identity in Dual-identity Organizations
Preetam Basu
Coordinating Multi-Channel Pricing of Seasonal Goods
Mean-Variance Analysis for Inventory Control
Supply Chain Finance Enabled Early Pay: Unlocking Trapped Value in B2B Logistics
Analysis of Back-Office Outsourcing Contracts for Financial Services Operations
Priya Seetharaman
Explaining Sophistication in Collaborative Technology Use: A Context-Technology Fit Perspective
Pulak Das
Learner Drop out in Indian School Education: A Case Study on the Impact of Mission Mode Programme of “Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan”
Rahul Mukerjee
A Trigonometric approach to Quaternary Code designs with application to one-eighth and one sixteenth fractions
Rahul Mukerjee
Probability Matching Priors for Two-sided Tolerance Intervals in Balanced One-way and Two-way Nested Random Effects Models
Rahul Roy
Cake Game: Comprehending Perishability
Dynamics of Software Requirement Volatility
Determinants of User Involvement in Software Projects
Rama Seth
Central Bank Target Rates and Term Structure of Interest Rates: A Study of Seven Asian countries
Foreign Bank lending behavior during three U.S. recessions.
Impact of Bank Capital, Charter Value and Market Discipline on Bank Risk Exposure: Evidence from Asia Pacific
Impact of Bank Capital, Charter Value and Market Discipline on Bank Risk Exposure: Evidence from Asia Pacific Countries
Ramendra Singh
A new conceptualization of salesperson’s customer orientation Propositions and implications
Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright ! Will India’s Tiger Economy Stimulate Its Business Marketing Space?
Bringing ‘Social’ into Sales ; The impact of salesperson's Social Media use on value oriented behavior and value creation
Does CSR Orientation Reflect Stakeholder Relationship Marketing Orientation? - An Empirical Examination of Indian Banks
Ranjan Das
New Venture Creation in a Knowledge Intensive Industry in India: An Experiment with INDIAN (Intelligent Network of Distributed and Independent Atomized Nodes) Model
Rohit Varman
Consuming postcolonial shopping malls
Applying a Transformative Consumer Research Lens to Understanding and Alleviating Poverty
Runa Sarkar
Agropedia- A knowledge management platform for Agriculture
Sustainability and Management Education in China and India: Enabling a Global Green Economic Transition
Sahadeb Sarkar
Robustification of the MLE without Loss of Efficiency
Sanjeet Singh
An Approach to Solve Bilevel Quadratic-linear Programming Problems
Measuring the Performance of Teams in the Indian Premier League
On Multiparametric Analysis in Generalized Transportation Problems
Somprakash Bandyopadhyay
A Decentralized Approach towards Location Tracking of Mobile Users in Opportunistic Networks
Sougata Ray
Developmental Programs, Microcredit and Gandhian Innovation: Pillars of a bottom of pyramid strategy?
Performance implications of technological knowledge development modes in emerging economy firms
Multilevel paradoxes in state-owned enterprises in emerginhg economies
Generic strategies in dynamic environments
Do managers add value in any environment?
Subir Bhattacharya
Towards a Framework for Assessing Agility
Optimal operating points in a coordinated supply chain of perishable item
Sudip Chaudhuri
Multinationals and Monopolies Pharmaceutical Industry in India after TRIPS
The Pharmaceutical Industry in India after TRIPS
Uttam Sarkar
Identifying influential stock indices from global stock markets: A social network analysis approach
V.K. Unni
Whether the Supreme Court's characterisation of non-obviousness will impact on the Federal Circuit's judicial creativity? An analysis of post-KSR decisions
Pradeep Gupta
Aneel G Karnani
Vini Mahajan
P M Murty
Shantanu Khosla
Vikram Bhalla
Nitin Sanker
Debashish Mukherjee
