Sunday Posts

India is one of the most complex markets of Higher Education in the world. It is complicated with multiple layers of regulation, with the States and the Centre having a say, and neither of them having a definitive say. It is a strange marketplace with a modern service economy overlaid on a middle class created by public sector careers, where conservatism and aspiration are in constant conflict. It is unusually corrupt, and this is one sector where Private Sector matches or betters Public Sector corruption (see my lament here ). All this makes any new idea, and market entry for a new institution, global or local, extremely difficult. ( see more here ) I have done several projects with global organisations trying to enter Indian Higher Ed market, and understand why they must try. ( see my earlier post here ) Despite the complexities, India is simply the biggest market for education. It is the arena where the big questions of education innovation are being played out, and to be a pl...

I come up a lot against the issue of culture, given that I mostly do what one would call International Business, and do so in Education, an area which is so culturally specific that most people banish both International and Business from vocabulary when dealing with it. So, in my day-to-day interactions, I both come across the Not-invented-here syndrome, that anything from a different culture should be rejected out of hand, and its inverted form, that culture does not matter. Indeed, I have a view, and I shall claim to be qualified to have one in this case. This, not just because I migrated mid-life and settled in another country, but because I escaped the entrapment of my native culture by deliberately trying to see it from outside. This, I believe, worked better for me than just reading about culture, which I had to do for professional reasons, and indeed, doing so made me think about the limitations of engaging with culture as a technical thing, a system of acting in a certain wa...

India seems indecipherable. It is an exciting market, just that it never materialises. I have used one expression - borrowed somewhat from James Kynge's book on China - that while India looks like a huge multiplier effect for businesses from outside, the moment you set foot in the country, the endless game of divisions begins. Also, India is like El Dorado - everyone wants to go there, but no one knows how. After repeated failed efforts, excitements in the world markets, the sentiments are now cooling: The India play is treated with caution, often avoided in favour of more exciting regions, like Brazil, or Indonesia, and now even Burma or Mongolia. However, it is hard to ignore India. Apart from the fact that it has so many of the new consumers, it is a potential breeding ground for competition in other markets. Leave India to local companies for far too long and a competitor will certainly emerge, who will better the game in prized markets that you wanted to keep your eggs in...