Meet The Indian Institute Of Management Calcutta MBAEx Class Of 2026

P&Q: Every January, P&Q publishes a “10 Business Schools to Watch” feature that highlights how schools are raising the bar and enhancing the student experience through innovation or expansion in programming or resources. What is one innovation that sets your school apart from your peer programs and makes you a business school to watch? Why is it so groundbreaking?

Rath: “The one innovation is the concept of Live Projects, which has been the first and maiden creation by the one-year MBA curriculum since 2020. It is positioned as uniquely different from the typical internship concepts followed by most B-schools when it comes to industry experience within an MBA curriculum. Live Project as unique micro-business project experience acts as a powerful differentiator, moving beyond traditional case studies to immerse students in micro-short-term business-oriented skill development projects.

The one-year MBA approach through its Live Projects provides a direct hands-on opportunity for students to apply their classroom knowledge to pressing business problems faced by a diverse range of organisations – from startups and established firms to for-profit and non-profit ventures. It also includes academic projects as well, with an industry-alumnus-faculty mentorship to oversee the process of working around a business problem in a micro-market space with a specific skill application.

There has been a remarkable 100%+ increase in firms collaborating with MBAEx Batch 18, from its initiation with batch 13 in 2020, in offering business related live projects across diverse industries. This highlights the unique value companies have acquired in this model, leveraging domain expertise of experienced professionals, while mentoring their initiation into new business/technology-oriented skills.

Furthermore, there is a focus on trendy themes like Digital Transformation & Gen AI Adoption; Sales, Engagement & GTM Strategy; Strategy Consulting & Process Improvement; and for the first time non-market strategy applications in Economic Development & District Level Acceleration. This has happened through collaborations with industry giants such as Accenture, EY, Shell, Persistent Systems, HPCL, SavvyParent, Vow Cabs, MountTech Growth Fund, SOUL, Afrinex, Central Cargo Movers, HL Industries Pvt. Ltd., DGLiger Consulting, Summit Consulting, BOD Consulting and 033. These partnerships demonstrate the one-year program’s commitment to staying at the forefront of industry needs. Afrinex and BFSI, and Unmukt and Hydrogen Leverage have been new alumni startups that have offered live projects as well.

By fostering direct engagement with a wide spectrum of organisations and current business challenges – experience of which runs parallel with the academic year – the students can corelate class and theory with industry-based future of work skills. These may not have been their earlier pre-MBA-based work profiles, thus offering them a training of sorts for potential industry or role pivots in placements. Live Project as an innovative criterion began as a maiden experimental venture for the one-year MBA at IIMC and is now a trend across several top B-Schools in India.”

P&Q: What types of programs do you offer to sharpen your students’ soft skills? What areas do you emphasize and how do you instill these skills in your students?

Rath: “Soft Skills for the one-year MBA at IIM Calcutta has been uniquely developed by two core workshops on strategic communication in the first 2 terms. There is 1 core behavioural science course in term 1, 2 specialised electives from the behavioural science and the communication academic groups in terms 5 and 6 (both being the last terms). Plus, there is the introduction of a communication-based guestimate training by the career development vertical of the institute. In addition, we have a collaborative venture by both the career development and the alumni team of our program – the NextGen Forum Skill Workshops. The intermittent nature of the spread of such events, workshops, courses, and collaborations help produce a continuous learning curve with soft skills – as Rome was not built in a day.

Communication Workshops: We have two communication workshops – Managerial Communication 1 and 2 – which individually develop not just the practical but the conceptual preparedness of communication in the world of business; the stress is on strategy and content creation. Workshop 1 innovates leveraging classic story-telling techniques like Freytag to deliver pitches through a public speaking format. Workshop 2 re-engineers hermeneutics and plot sequencing to synergise logic, strategy, and plot in developing and articulating a business argument in a formal team presentation on a business case.

Human Behaviour at Work is the flagship behavioural science 20 session course running parallel to the communication workshops. It supplements strategy and conceptual communication models with behavioural introspection, introspective diaries, team performance, and presentation feedback based on behavioural insights.  The term 5 elective from the Behavioural Science academic group – Effective Political Skills for Career Success – is a one-of-a-kind course across global B-Schools. It leverages research in the fields of psychology, sociology, and literature to provide a holistic understanding of the intersections of politics in managerial success through assessment of one’s political skills in immersive practices of influence, and personal effectiveness, mimicking similar practices in the workplace.

Parallel to Behavioural Politis is the course on Problem Solving Techniques in Corporate Communication. It focuses on the politics of narratives, and offers an investigative avenue towards how narratives shape markets – myth markets, recruitment softwares and innovative-disruptive sub-cultures – thus repositioning markets as cultural shares and strategy as cultural strategy.

There is another program interspersed amidst the theory and practice of the courses that highlight not just the dramatics and performance aspect, but the underlining deep seated structural principles of soft skills. It is the new initiation with the one-year MBA batch 18’s NextGen Forum Skill Workshop as a collaborative offer by the Career Development Vertical and the MBAEx alumni team.

The workshop was the in-depth simulated practical performance-oriented hyper-personalised recruitment practices by our Alumni. There were 6 hyper-personalised off-campus simulated theatrical practices of recruitment activities, with micro-performances of interview and CV skill building events, centered around soft skills.

Together, the Skill Workshops have opened up a space that will be hugely leveraged in the coming year with Future of Work-related skill development – so that students learn the language of the industry and the semantics of specialised skills.”

P&Q: What types of programming – through classroom instruction, extracurriculars, and treks – does your school offer to expose students to country-specific and global business practices? What have students told you were the most educational and fun aspects of these activities?

Rath: “IIM Calcutta provides extensive exposure to global business practices through its International Immersion module, a cornerstone of the MBAEx program. In 2024-25, 40 MBAEx students each travelled to SDA Bocconi Business School in Italy and ESADE Business School in Spain for intensive two-week programs. At ESADE, these modules featured updated curricula, including Non-Market Strategies, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Finance. While at SDA Bocconi, there was a strong focus on sustainability with a “Hydrogen in Europe Challenge” live project along with extensive product differentiation and scenario planning sessions.

Beyond classroom instruction, students engaged in enriching treks to companies like Familia Torres Winery and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre in Spain, offering insights into sustainable business and technological innovation. In Italy, visits to Dallara Automobili and E. Zegna provided a deep dive into luxury brand management, engineering, and the evolving dynamics of the “Made-in-Italy” sector. Students consistently highlighted the hands-on experiences—like the “Hydrogen in Europe Challenge” through a scenario planning live project, and the interactive team-building adventure in Barcelona—as the most educational and enjoyable aspects. In addition, students also gained value from the unique insights gained from company visits such as the “surreal” experience at Dallara and the convergence of history and technology at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Additionally, IIM Calcutta offers a unique introductory event for its incoming students starting right from the day of the program inauguration. It is called ‘Start-up Garage’. Organized by the IIM Calcutta Innovation Park (IIMCIP), the 48-hour entrepreneurial sprint sets the tone for a year of transformation, challenge, and reinvention. The whirlwind event has now been running for 2 years and is highly valued by the students. The event seamlessly aligned with IIM Calcutta’s mission to foster entrepreneurial thinking in our society.

A brief about the Startup Garage event for this year are as follows. Before joining the program, students were requested to share an entrepreneurial idea they were keen to work on with the Program Office. On the evening of their inauguration, the Program Chairperson and about 9 Alumni from the program (who have been successful entrepreneurs) joined the students over the next 48 hours. The Chief Business Officer of the IIMCIP ran the event extremely enthusiastically and over the period of 48 gruelling hours, students worked on ideas as groups before pitching their start-up idea to an esteemed panel of judges.

For the Class of 2026, from the 90 initial ideas, about a third were taken forward. After an elevator pitch and poster presentations, the final 12 teams were chosen. The entire batch organized themselves around these 12 themes/ideas and worked tirelessly to create their final business plan for the start-up they wished to work on. Teams had to learn aspects like making basic income statements, devising business strategies, communicating ideas effectively – all of it without a single class at the B-school. The 9 Alumni were the support system and acted as mentors for the students over the 2 days. The batch experienced the true feeling of being a start-up in a garage. Working with batchmates they hardly knew created bonds which would last. Pushing each other to distribute tasks and then getting to eventually working through another night before the final presentations created a strong sense of ownership among the batch. The top 3 teams took home the laurels, but the entire batch left with a feeling of wonder and excitement for the B-school lessons that were to follow from the next day.”

P&Q: What are the most exciting new courses that your school is offering to MBAs this school year? What makes them so unique and valuable?

Rath: “IIM Calcutta’s MBAEx Program consistently updates its curriculum to stay relevant with evolving global business trends. The newly-introduced courses are particularly unique and valuable due to their focus on emerging topics and their direct applicability to the challenges faced by experienced professionals in today’s dynamic environment. The emphasis was on sustainability across verticals, with both Finance and Economics and Operations Management offering courses on the same.

Sustainable Supply Chain Analytics introduced how to do the following:

Understand Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Comprehend the Triple Bottom Line (TBL)

Define and differentiate the People, Planet, and Profit dimensions of TBL

Examine Sustainable Supply Chains

Investigate the importance of sustainable practices in supply chain management.

Identify strategies to create environmentally and socially responsible supply chains

Learn to apply Concepts through Simulation.

Apply SDGs, TBL, and sustainable supply chain principles to make strategic decisions in the areas of supplier contracting, multiple sourcing, processor selection, operations, warehouse, and supply chain management, category management, farmer interventions, CO2 compensation etc.

Economics of Climate Change: Implications for Financial Sector stands out as a course that is collaboratively designed and produced by both Finance and Economics group, with its unique attempt to do the following:

Provide students with an understanding of the current theoretical and conceptual framework on implications of climate change (climate risks) for the broader economy, and then specifically the Financial sector.

Help students apply microeconomic concepts of externalities and public goods to comprehend the failure of the financial sector to provide adequate financial flows for climate change related investments.

Expose students to credit markets and the traditional financial risk management framework to understand climate change as a financial risk.

Understand what climate finance entails and concepts of public finance, blended finance and institutional mechanisms for financing climate investments.

Develop a global perspective that is built upon knowledge of economic, technological, regulatory and political forces that are shaping a new international order in the 21st century.

New courses also emphasized hard core finance with strategy and economics and data sciences.

Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management made a comeback for Batch 18, as it oversaw how to do the following:

Introduce the concepts of investment analysis and portfolio management.

Analyze how to assess the news and information flow and their potential impact on investments.

Understand how to mitigate the risks involved in investments in risky assets.

Apprehend the basic difference in the working and characteristics of Mutual Funds and Hedge Funds.

Learn to implement quantitative trading strategies such as the momentum strategy.

Business Valuation was re-imagined to help students with the following:

Understand the fundamental principles and tools of valuation.

Forecast future financials for valuation purposes.

Estimate key inputs required in valuation models like the cost of capital, growth rates, and terminal values.

Recognize and differentiate various approaches and models of business valuation, including dividend-based, earnings-based, and cash flow-based models and choose the most appropriate approach.

Apply the valuation tools and techniques in different settings like start-ups, financial services firms, etc.

Strategic Leadership made a comeback to enable students to do the following:

Help develop plausible explanations for why a leader makes a specific sequence of strategic choices on behalf of an organization or a collective.

Understand the conceptual and analytical scope of Strategic Management while engaging with the dynamic aspect of leading organizations.

Explore the ingredients of novel strategies and cultivate judgment as a strategic / leadership skill.

Understand perspectives derived from the sociology of strategy and the psychology of strategy rather than merely from the economics of strategy.

Auction and Business Applications from the Economics Academic group helped in the following ways:

Develop an understanding of basic auction theory – both as a participant and as a designer.

Comprehend the application of auction theory in operative search engines and allocating telecommunication spectrum.

Fathom the complexities of Auction theory when it is used for procurement, that is, buy rather than sell discrete objects.

Statistics for Data Science and Business Analytics helped students to do the following:

Understand various applications of Statistical Data Science.

Gain basic understanding of tools such as semi-parametric/non-parametric inference, and R programming.

Develop Bayesian models to incorporate domain knowledge in decision making.

Understand the use of causal models with applications in different industries.

Gain knowledge about the entire cycle for solving a business problem through data analysis.

And finally, the Organizational Behaviour academic group introduced the very timely elective on Managing Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations with a parallel offer from the Management of Information Systems academic group – Responsible AI and Future Tech Strategies.

Managing Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations helped with these areas:

Develop a comprehensive understanding of organizational D&I by drawing on theories and insights from disciplines such as psychology, social psychology, sociology and management.

Recognize social identities and processes of stigmatization and discrimination; individual, group and organizational dynamics of diversity.

Learn to manage D&I-related conflict; glean practical perspectives from cases and practitioners and be an inclusive leader.

Understand the importance of adopting an ethic of care to foster D&I and acquire the ability to assess the success of D&I initiatives.

Fathom the future of D&I in the era of technology, where AI is increasingly being used in organizational decision-making, to help experienced and future managers proactively identify and address issues before they disadvantage and do disservice to the organization and its people.

Equip students through these perspectives, to be more just, ethical and inclusive.

And, Responsible AI and Future Tech Strategies helped in these areas:

Sensitize students about the benefits and challenges of immersive technologies, cloud computing, metaverse, and GenAI.

Learn about explainable AI/ML models and related best practices.

Understand how to make AI more approachable.

Gain practical insights about integrating and managing these novel technologies.

In essence, 8 new courses were introduced in the one-year MBA program at IIM Calcutta, in a year which had a record 44 electives on offer across 10 academic groups.”

Next Page: In-depth Profiles of 10 Members of the Class of 2026

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