IIMs are yet to produce a big management idea, says HBS's Vijay Govindarajan

Vijay Govindarajan, Tuck School of Business, Harvard Business School
"It's true we haven't seen any really big ideas since CK Prahlad. CK was my mentor and he was an extraordinary talent. He was a big ideas man all through his career, right from core competence to the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.

When I was a doctoral student at Harvard Business School in the 70s, there were so many faculty with big ideas. But somewhere along the way, the big idea machine slowed down. When Harvard Business Review listed the big ideas of the last century, you could see the big gap between the number of ideas that came out in the 70s and 80s and the number that came out in the 90s and 00s (the last entry to make it to the list was my concept of Reverse Innovation).

Why has this happened? For one thing, something has changed in the B-school's reward systems. Promotion and tenure are focused on publishing in A-level academic journals. These journals favour theoretical work with high levels of mathematical analysis. You have to be extremely narrow in your focus and sophisticated in your methodology to be published in journals like Marketing Science or Journal of Marketing Research. Even if the research is empirical, you have to satisfy the reviewers of the rigour of your methodology.

Add to this the fact that PhD students in B-schools no longer come from an MBA background. They more commonly have degrees in mathematics and economics. When you do an MBA, you understand the issues faced by managers. You understand how the various disciplines are intertwined, how finance relates to operations or marketing. Indeed, most PhD students today don't even have any industry work experience. This is very different from my time, when most academicians had MBAs with work experience. Publishing research wasn't as rigorous a process then as it is now.

Business schools today need to step back and ask themselves why we exist. I think we exist to impact the world. Our intellectual pursuits need to have some daring. We need both A-level journal research and big ideas. Today, there are people like Marshall Goldsmith and Ram Charan who are not in academics but they interact with industry and they have great ideas. Corporates don't see any big ideas coming from academics, so they are happy to embrace ideas from elsewhere.

Lastly, it is time for academicians from the emerging markets to come up with big ideas. The Indian Institutes of Management have been around for more than 50 years, the Indian School of Business has been around for a decade, but they have yet to produce a big idea."