Dipak Jain Named New Dean of INSEAD

Dipak Jain will assume the deanship of INSEAD in March of 2011.

Dipak C. Jain, the highly popular former dean of Northwestern’s Kellogg School, was named today the new dean of one of Europe’s top business schools, INSEAD. Jain, who led Kellogg from 2001 to 2009, succeeds J. Frank Brown, who will step down in March of next year.

Jain’s appointment is a coup for INSEAD, which in recent years has lost the distinction of being known as the best B-school in Europe to the London Business School and other rivals in Spain and Switzerland. The Financial Times now ranks INSEAD fifth, while The Economist ranks it as low as 23rd in the world. Poets&Quants ranks INSEAD fifth among non-U.S. schools, behind London, IESE in Spain, IMD in Switzerland, and IE Business School in Spain. Clearly, Jain’s job will be to return INSEAD, based in France with campuses in Singapore and Abu Dhabi, to its earlier status as the best business school outside the U.S.

“What attracts me to INSEAD is that it is a true global brand in management education, one with enduring passion and inspired vision,” Jain said in a statement. “The values that drive INSEAD — including a deep respect for the power of diversity; a desire to link theory and practice to address important managerial issues; and an entrepreneurial approach to teaching and research — are ideal to meet the opportunities and challenges facing organisations in the coming years.”

Jain’s departure is a significant loss for the Kellogg School. He is an exceptionally gifted professor who was widely liked and admired by students and faculty alike. Jain understood the importance of the Kellogg School’s unique student-driven culture and had long been its biggest champion, outside of Don Jacobs, the legendary Kellogg dean who he succeeded.

A noted scholar in marketing and entrepreneurship, Jain has published some 60 articles in scholarly and professional journals and three books. He has presented and lectured at universities throughout the world, and is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching and scholarship.

Jain brings unusual experience to the job, having taken over the school in 2001 for an eight-year stint as dean. It was a difficult time, at least from a rankings standpoint. Kellogg went from being number one in the BusinessWeek rankings in 2002 to number three when Jain left in 2009. In The Financial Times surveys, the school fell from ninth place in 2001 to 21st in 2009 as the FT’s methodology began to favor non-U.S. schools.

Jain has been a member of review committees at Harvard, UCLA, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Northwestern. He is a graduate of Guwahati University in India and received a Masters in management science and a PhD in marketing from the University of Texas at Dallas. He serves on international advisory boards and councils such as the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration (Chulalongkorn University), the Carey Business School (Johns Hopkins), and American University in Cairo, and Nyenrode University (Netherlands). He is a member of the American Marketing Association and The Institute of Management Sciences, and has consulted with such companies as IBM, UBS, AT&T, Nestle, Abbott, Boeing, Accenture, Thompson Electronics, and American Express. He is currently Executive Editor of the Sasin Journal of Management (Thailand) and a member of the Editorial Board of the Asian Journal of Marketing (Singapore).  He has also been a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of American Statistics Association; Management Science; Marketing Science; the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, and the Journal of Marketing Research.

Apart from teaching, Jain is currently involved in two social projects: creating a business school in Bangladesh, focusing on entrepreneurship and small business management, for women from countries such as Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Pakistan; and starting a full-fledged university in Angola.  He is a director of John Deere, the Northern Trust, Reliance Industries and Media Bank.

“Management education must include social and environmental elements of the ecosystem,” says Jain. “For global prosperity and peace to come in the world, we have to target women. These are all values that are central to INSEAD, which has always had a global approach, has emphasised diversity in its Faculty, staff, and student body, and strives for innovation backed by intensive research.”

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