XLRI, the country’s oldest B-school, started its third full-time two-year postgraduate diploma programme at an event held in its Delhi NCR campus on Friday.

Co-founder of Mamaearth, Varun Alagh, inaugurated the Post Graduate Diploma in Management in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Venture Creation (IEV) in the presence of XLRI Jamshedpur director Fr Paul Fernandes and XLRI Delhi-NCR director Fr George Sebastian.

“This is a momentous occasion for XLRI as it is the third time in the history of the oldest B-school in India and Asia that a full time two-year PGDM programme has been launched. The HR programme was launched 1954 and the Business Management (BM) programme was launched in 1968. Both happened over 50 years back. This is an important step by XLRI towards a more contemporary approach to business education,” said an XLRI faculty associated with the programme.

Speaking about the programme, Alagh said: “This MBA gives an unprecedented opportunity to start-up founders to take a measured step towards their own business.”

Fr Paul Fernandes said the programme was meticulously designed to maximise experiential learning for aspiring entrepreneurs. “This might just be the beginning of the next big thing in entrepreneurship and in business education,” he added.

The first batch has 43 students and is among the largest in terms of B-schools offering similar courses in India.

Students will have to crack the Xavier Aptitude Test to take part in the programme.

“The importance of entrepreneurship in an economy has been realised by all countries and the entrepreneurial eco-system has been growing by leaps and bounds in the past few years. Educational institutions, including IITs and IIMs, have played important contributors by setting up incubators on several campuses. One missing piece in this puzzle has been an effective educational programme in entrepreneurship. While the IEV programme has been offered by several other institutes, this is the first time it is being offered by such a highly ranked institution (ranked eighth in NIRF ranking among management schools),” said a spokesperson for the institution.

It is a full-time AICTE-approved course in entrepreneurship, which offers structured long-term support for aspiring entrepreneurs by combining management education with incubation/acceleration. It approaches management education from the viewpoint of start-ups and is designed to deliver learning, which is relevant and useful to entrepreneurs. As a result of this progressive and integrative approach, an aspiring entrepreneur/student doesn’t have to choose between an MBA and starting his own venture.

Representatives of many of XLRI’s ecosystem partners, including Indian Angel Network (IAN), Jagriti Yatra, Microsoft, VakilSearch, Lawyered, Qapita, Fundenable and Inflection Point Ventures, spoke during the inaugural event.