By Jaydeep Saha, digital LEARNING Bureau
Dr. Bala Balachandran, Founder and Dean, Great Lakes (Left), Shantanu Prakash, MD & CEO Educomp (Right)
Educomp through its affiliate company, Beacon, recently announced a strategic partnership with Great Lakes Institute of Management (Great Lakes), one of India’s premier management institutes.
The partnership will help Great Lakes expand its presence across India with an investment of about ` 150 crores over the next five years and is expected to substantially expand the reach of the world class management education it has been offering at its magnificent platinum LEED-rated campus in Chennai.
Commenting on this occasion, Shantanu Prakash, CEO of Educomp said, “The partnership with Great Lakes is a natural corollary of Educomp’s growth trajectory towards specialised and world class higher education and found a good fit with our future plans. Our breadth of experience in the education sector and our expertise in various verticals will help in enlarging the reach and scope of Great Lakes”.
With this partnership with Educomp, Great Lakes will have campuses in the leading metros including Chennai, Delhi NCR and Mumbai. As part of this expansion, Great Lakes is launching its Delhi NCR campus in Gurgaon in collaboration with the Institute of Energy Management of Research (IEMR). IEMR is a management institute exclusively focused on the Energy sector driven by academics and professionals with exceptional credentials in Energy and offers India’s most comprehensive Energy management program.
Great Lakes has a tie-up with the Bauer School of Business at the University of Houston to offer its globally top-ranked Executive Energy Management program in India. IEMR and Great Lakes would work to extend the scope of this tie-up to other Energy programs also and create a world class Center of Excellence in Energy Management at Gurgaon.
Dr. Bala Balachandran, founder and Dean of Great Lakes and the J L Kellogg Distinguished Professor at the Kellogg Business School, USA said, “This synergistic partnership of two giants, one a thought leader and content provider in Great Lakes and the other in communicating and delivering value through technology and e-learning gives an immense opportunity to provide eternal and perpetual value to the World at large”.
Great Lakes has pioneered several innovations in management education such as having the best management gurus from around the world teach their areas of expertise, new and flexible program formats that meet students’ needs such as one year full-time program and two-year weekend programs, offering both functional specialisation and industry orientation.
Each of the new campuses of Great Lakes will have their unique functional and sector specialisations offering students the opportunity to pursue their specific interests and passions. Educomp has been a pioneer in using technology to improve the quality of education. Educomp, directly and through its affiliates, will provide management expertise, technology and infrastructure support to help Great Lakes in its expansion.
Dr. B. S. K. Naidu, FNAE, Chairman of IEMR commented that “IEMR’s vision has always been to become the leading energy sector focused academic and research institute in Asia. This collaboration takes us one step closer to achieving our vision and enables us to expand it beyond Asia to the entire world. We look forward to the endless possibilities this combination of forces represents”.
