Ted Sargent, vice president, University of Toronto and Tiff Macklem, dean, Rotman School, spoke to The Times of India on the trends in management education and what B-schools need to focus on to stay relevant. The interview was published on April 24. Q -- With US and UK institutes registering a drop in application from Indian students, how do you see this impacting enrolments in Canadian institutes? A -- Rankings play a key role in the decision-making process of students while selecting institutes. Indian students, especially, focus on employability. We have witnessed an increase in our applications and certainly the current global political scenario has played a part in this. This coupled with the fact that Canada is a safe, liberal, welcoming country with comfortable immigration, foreign and employment policies. Q -- How important is design thinking in helping B-schools remain relevant? A --- Businesses are driven by customers. Understanding customer needs and building a product to cater to their demand is important. Design thinking is spreading in every industry and is driven by technology and customer demands. However, apart from design thinking the way management schools teach entrepreneurship too matters. Entrepreneurship classes have to be taught in a different way than other subjects. Teaching entrepreneurship needs to be more experiential. Some aspects can be learnt in the classroom but students also need to acquaint themselves with the practical aspects of being an entrepreneur since the pressure, ambiguity and uncertainty of working in a start-up environment is unique. Q -- How is management education changing? A -- Management education is becoming more experiential. To teach entrepreneurship, we need students to work in real start-ups and face real life situations. At Rotman, we have classroom work and then we move to case studies. Real businesses bring in their real time problems and our students come up with solutions for them. A successful business and life depends on one’s analytical and behavioural skills. Our programmes are analytical in nature. We also have self-development programme. This programme includes small groups and one-on-one coaching for students where they are encouraged to develop a number of personal skills including selfawareness, adaptability, leadership etc. The programme takes the students through steps to help them utilise their potential.