The Hindu Business Line : A boost for SMEs

Realising that promoters and employees of SMEs (small and medium enterprises) are looking for critical management inputs and business guidance to run their businesses, the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and U21G, the online graduate school, will jointly offer a post-graduate certificate programme to fulfil their needs.

The programme, designed by NSRCEL (Nadathur S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning) and expected to be launched in December this year, will be delivered in a blended format comprising both online and face-to-face classes. The 16-month programme would comprise four blocks with one week in each block having face-to-face contact with professors at the Institute.

Dr B. Mahadevan, Professor and Programme Co-director, IIMB, said that the programme was basically targeted at four categories of people: first generation entrepreneurs, second-generation entrepreneurs, professionals working in family businesses and techies wanting to start new ventures. "We plan to take about 60 students in the first batch and increase the number in the consecutive batches," said Prof Kalyani Gandhi, Professor and Chairperson, NSRCEL, IIMB. The course fee is Rs 3 lakh for a residential programme and Rs 2.5 lakh for a non-residential programme. Subjects offered a part of the curriculum are managerial accounting, entrepreurship and new venture creation, data analysis and decision making, financial management, strategic management and a project course. Mr Girish Rangan, Country Manager, India U21G, said that one of the `unique offerings of the programme is the assumption about the time constraint an entrepreneur faces and hence certain tools have been developed to help them not compromise on the learning process.