Service Modification Through Mass Customization in the Professional Education Service Industry : Scope, Challenges and Management

Today, the rapidly growing Indian service sector confronts a complex paradox where, on the one hand it is relentlessly striving for suitable human resources and on the other hand, it is tackling the problem of largest pool of unemployed skilled manpower. What causes these two contradictions to exist together? The primary reason is the miserable failure of the Indian Professional Education Service Industry in appreciating and responding to the changing needs and demands of business enterprises, which absorb its ‘final product’ (an ‘industry-ready’ and ‘employable’ student). More importantly, in spite of operating in an extremely diverse country like India, this industry largely follows mass production of education services and therefore it fails to cater to the polar needs of the students who vary significantly (in terms of educational and social background), resulting in producing a lot of degree holders, but very few who are actually industry-ready and employable, and hence the above mentioned paradox exists. This calls for quality research in the area of ‘New Service Development’ (NSD) for the Professional Education Service Industry, but unfortunately in India, this is comparatively less studied and poorly practiced area till now. Management education in India largely follows a ‘mass production’ approach for designing and delivering the MBA course to the students and that is why in spite of having large number of B-schools, hardly any had made it to the national level rankings. Taking MBA as the test curriculum, this research contributes by providing a theoretical framework that integrates both, process and resource-oriented perspectives for steering management education into the next level of mass customization and exploring the scope, challenges and managerial issues en route. This study assumes that enhancing mass customization will boost-up creation of customized learning environments and individualized instruction methodologies which in turn will affect the use of information, content delivery and service technologies to enable students to develop skill sets based on their strengths and as demanded by the industry