The other massive area of the Indian economy where IIMB can have an impact is micro-enterprise, he said. There are millions of people who basically are entrepreneurs out of because they have no choice but to be entrepreneurs and run little business like kirana (grocery) shops, village foundries and handicraft operations, he said.

Their economic performance can be greatly enhanced by improving their business skills through MOOCs, he said. Like any enterprise, "they also use business principles", he said. "They have to deal with inventory, and cash flow and marketing and sales."

"Now we couldn't teach them the way we do in our normal classrooms where we do case studies about big companies and so on," Vachani said. "But somebody could create programmes that could help microenterprises understand their business better, be more efficacious and that's were we can help."

"We would like to think about creating courses for micro-enterprises, micro-entrepreneurs and provide training for them partly using MOOCs and partly using association with large universities, large technical universities which have hundreds of thousands of students as partners," he added.

Given India's limited Internet reach, some of the courses would have to developed to work on smart phones, he said.

As for the IIMB's core mission, "we will, of course, continue to educate MBAs who will go and join the top companies in the world," Vachani said. "We are very good at that. But there is no reason why the same institution cannot use its expertise in management to create special courses for the microenterprises."

The first MOOC from IIMB," Statistics for Business I", started on edX on July 7. It is being followed by courses in innovation, information technology management and operations management.

Vachani said that students can take these MOOCs as well as others from institutions like the MIT and Harvard University to develop their skills. Ultimately, he said, it may be possible to combine courses from these universities to create packages for specific needs.
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