Tim Gore, Director, CIB, The University of Greenwich

Tim Gore

Director of the Centre for Indian Business
The University of Greenwich

Tim Gore OBE is the founding Director of the Centre for Indian Business, the University of Greenwich. His role is to engage the University of Greenwich's intellectual capital with India and to create sustainable and mutually beneficial partnerships.

Tim has worked closely with educationalists, institutions, companies and governments to improve bilateral and multilateral educational links in Hong Kong, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Jordan and India over a 23 year career. He has led the development of programmes on creativity for professionals with the Singapore Government (CREST); established e-learning and blended learning programmes for Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai; led the establishment of the British University in Dubai; and helped Jordan establish an evaluation framework for its ICT led Jordan Education Initiative. His most recent role was Director, Education at the British Council in India where he was responsible for growing the knowledge partnership between India and UK. In addition, Tim led the establishment of the UK India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI).

Tim is pursuing a doctorate in business administration (DBAHEM) at the University of Bath focussing on higher education. His research concerns the positioning of universities as knowledge producers in a globalising world.

Rahul- What were the drivers of setting up of the Centre for Indian Business at the University of Greenwich? Please share some of the highlights of your work as the Director of the Centre.
Tim-The vision for the Centre for Indian Business came from two different perspectives. Firstly, the University of Greenwich has links with India go back to the 1950s and it now has the largest number of Indian students of any university in the UK. Secondly, the areas of strength that the University has chime very well with India. Greenwich has over 100 years of experience in providing relevant, skills-based, industry-facing training and applied research. As a large, publicly funded university, that serves a very diverse student body it faces many of the challenges that Indian institutions also do in enhancing employability and widening engagement.

Many of our areas of strength are extremely relevant to India’s current and future development – our business school; our work in the pharmaceutical industry; the expertise in adapting agriculture to changing climactic conditions or our complex simulations in computing or engineering. The University of Greenwich specialises in applying knowledge to real industry needs in a broad range of industries.

The Centre for Indian Business works in two directions. On the one hand it provides easy access to knowledge and understanding of the Indian business world and acts as a hub where people can network, discuss and access information. We also run two MBAs focussed on India. At the same time, the centre works closely with institutions, industry and its communities to forge strong and mutually beneficial knowledge links with Indian business and business education through the centre into UK.

My role as the founding director has been stimulating and diverse. In order to engage the university effectively with India I have to understand the strengths that Greenwich can bring to bear in the engagement. As an example, I have worked closely with the School of Science looking at how their expertise in drug formulation and expertise fits with the aspirations of the rapidly developing Indian pharmaceuticals and biotechnology sector. I then visited a number of these companies in India with the Science team and engaged in a fascinating series of discussions about harnessing our ability to recombine existing techniques of drug formulation and delivery to create novel solutions to problems in the industry such as vaccine delivery systems for different types of domestic animals.

The other side of the role is the need to be very ‘in-touch’ with India and this entails meeting people from across many sectors in India and being able to make connections with them. I keep in touch with contacts through regular events, engaging forums that we run; and attending key events. I also have an active LinkedIn site and I run a couple of specialist groups within the site. It is important to be visible and accessible and I keep a regular calendar of public events. Recently, I had the privilege of running a master class on higher education partnerships with Pawan Agrawal and Shobha Misra at the annual FICCI higher education summit in Delhi.

Rahul- One of your projects relate to mapping business research capacity and networks in India. Please share the project background and major outputs expected.
Tim- India is relatively under-published in relation to its scholarly capacity in both science and social sciences. Indian management research output tends to concentrate almost exclusively around the IITs and then the IIMs. The links to the US are strong but to other countries much less so. The Government of India are keen to increase research outputs and are establishing a new class of research-led university as well as new IITs and IIMs. A number of excellent business schools are developing in India outside of the traditional IIMs and IITs and the field of management education is developing rapidly. At the same time, an increasing number of leading business writers, such as CK Prahalad and Pankaj Ghemawat are of Indian origin and the leading institutes of management in India are of world class. There are few leading journals or academic publishers coming out of India at the moment but there are signs that this is changing too as Emerald releases its new Journal of Indian Business Research and other publishers such as Tata McGraw Hill set up in India.

The Business Research Capacity and Networks project is a partnership between the Centre for Indian Business, Emerald Group Publishing; IMT Ghaziabad and FICCI. Emerald are funding a research student who works out of IMT Ghaziabad and the Director of IMT, Dr Anwar Ali, chairs an impressive advisory committee. The research project aims to characterise published Indian management research and compare it with international norms and do a social analysis of the research environment to look at the factors involved in the development of Indian journals; the process of publishing and the motivations and constraints involved. It will also map the collaborative networks in the sector and how they relate inside and outside the country.

The study will identify, areas of strength, networks of researchers, leaders in their class and overseas linkages as well as the trends likely to emerge in the coming years. It would also review the publishing industry and identify current leading publications as well as where there is scope for future excellence. We expect this study to generate considerable interest in India and internationally.

Rahul- You have extensive experiences in UK-India relationships in the area of education. What are the top two trends you are witnessing in this area?
Tim- The main trend is the escalation in academic collaborations aimed at offering joint, dual or franchised degrees from UK universities in India. There is tremendous excitement in this area at the moment particularly in view of the promised introduction of new legislation to regularise these sort of partnerships. The UK has been in the vanguard of this type of activity for nearly a decade but the interest has increased enormously over the past year.

India has a robust and burgeoning middle tier of institutions nearly all of which are private. These tend to be very employment focussed and overall I think this feeds very effectively into the growth of the Indian economy. The current estimates of the gross engagement ratio for India is around 12.9% and the current government are hoping to lift this to 30% by 2020 – an increase of around 40 million students in the system. The capacity is growing very rapidly as both the private sector and public sector expand and I see signs that growth in capacity is actually outpacing growth in demand despite these ambitious targets for the GER (which after all are actually targets rather than real students). This situation will lead to a bit of a shake-out in the higher education sector where visible quality will become increasingly important to the survival of institutions. Good international links will undoubtedly play a major role in this brand differentiation.