Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore is a reputed business school located in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. Established in 1973, it was chronologically the third in the first generation of IIMs, after IIM Calcutta and IIM Ahmedabad, thereby forming the elite Indian B-School trio colloquially known as "ABC", or "IIM A/B/C".
IIMB was established by the Government of India as an institute of excellence for education, training, research, and consulting in the field of management, and allied areas of knowledge. Located in India's high technology capital, IIMB's entrepreneurship centre NSRCEL is the leading business incubator among startup hubs at any STEM college or B-School in India, including all IITs and IIMs.
IIMB offers master's, and doctoral programmes in business administration, management, business analytics, and public policy. It also offers executive education programmes, and bachelor's in economics, data science, and digital business. The two-year MBA in general management is the flagship programme of the institute.
History
Founding
In 1972, a committee headed by Ravi J. Matthai, first director of IIM Ahmedabad, noting the rising demand for graduates of the first two IIMs, recommended the need to have two more IIMs. The new IIM was to be set up at Bangalore, and for the proposed institute, the Government of Karnataka offered of land, and a contribution of INR 3 million. Ultimately, on 27 March 1972, the IIMB Society was officially registered in Bangalore under the Mysore Societies' Registration Act.The prominent Indian banker T.A. Pai, the Ex-Chairman of Syndicate Bank and Life Insurance Corporation, accepted to be the first Chairperson of the IIMB Board of Governors, and N.S. Iyer Ramaswamy, the then director of NITIE Mumbai, was appointed as the first Director of the institute. The institute was inaugurated by Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, on 28 October 1973 at the Ravindra Kalakshetra in Bangalore. And, though it was not a legally-binding mandate from the Indian government, the first director tried to mold IIMB to cater to the needs of govt-owned entities like PSUs/PSEs, utility corporations, etc. due to his own left-leaning persuasions.
Initial years
The institute started operations in the campus of St. Joseph's College of Commerce, and some other buildings rented on the Langford Road in the city. Hostel provisions were temporarily made in the H.C. Dasappa Memorial Buildings in Jayanagar. The institute's first activity was a three-day conference in 1973, on urban development and management, which invited officials from all municipal corporations in Karnataka. Thereafter, IIMB started conducting Management Development Programmes and Organisation Based Programmes for public sectors like power, irrigation, health, etc.The first PG management course started in 1974, and the first doctoral course started in 1976. The institute held its first convocation on 10 July 1976 with a total of 48 graduating students, and on the same day the board also announced the appointment of architects for designing the official campus. On 27 November 1978, the 'Guddalipooja' ceremony of the campus on Bannerghatta Road was performed. In 1979, the institute started separate sections for sector-wise PGP courses, and in 1980 the first fellowship diploma was awarded. IIMB moved operations to its own campus in 1983.
Crisis and reforms
The government entities did not show interest in IIMB's initiatives, and even by the 1980s, the institute could only get marginal success. Moreover, the employee union had co-opted external political leadership unconcerned with the institute's vision leading to severe dysfunction, and then resignation of the Director in mid-1983. Thereafter, for two years IIMB had no permanent Director, and further stagnated. The faculty was also split into 'sectoral' and 'business management' wings which had severe mutual disagreements. Thus, the institute encountered a period of serious crisis, administratively, and identity-wise.Finally, Joe Philip was appointed by the board on 15 April 1985 with a clear mandate to bring back discipline. As Ex-VP at The Oberoi Group, he had experience in dealing with manpower issues. Under his charge, IIMB also started shifting away from its "state-corp" focus. He oversaw redesigning of PGP courses, increase in student intakes, and formalization of performance assessments. The sector-wise sections were also discontinued by 1986. The almost-dead FPM course was resuscitated by changing its focus from industry-sector to business-management. He was also instrumental in IIMB partnership with EFMD to initiate the faculty development programme in 1988-89. Importantly, in August 1990, he was able to wrest control of the Director's office from the union's illegal occupation after more than six years.
Growth
Dr. K.R.S. Murthy was appointed the Director on 11 February 1991 and remained till 28 February 1997. His tenure coincided with the economic liberalisation in India, and is mainly credited for driving the institute towards excellence. The PGP curriculum was further revised in 1991-92 to align it with global MBA programs. For manufacturing industries, a Management Program for Technologists was started for mid-level engineers in 1992, along with a short-term program for senior executives in collaboration with MIT Sloan. IIMB became the first Indian B-School to have internet on campus in December 1995, within four months of national internet launch.In 1996, the management icon Dr. Henry Mintzberg selected IIM Bangalore over other Indian B-Schools as one of the five international founding-members of the IMPM Consortium. In 1998, the DoPT, in partnership with UNDP, selected IIMB to setup a Centre for Public Policy which ultimately came up in July 2000. The institute got considerable endowment from an alumnus in 1999 to power-up the NSRCEL incubation centre.
The reforms and developments brought a successful turnaround, and wider recognition. In 2000, the Business Today magazine ranked IIMB the 1st in India in their BT-Cosmode Top 100 B-Schools survey. In 2003, The Wall Street Journal included IIMB among the top-100 B-Schools globally, in the unranked list of Next 50 B-Schools. India's key IT entity, NASSCOM, selected IIMB in 2005 for the Best India IT User Award in the education category. In 2011, IIMB became India's first B-School to sign a distribution agreement with Harvard Business Publishing for case studies.
In the 21st century, IIMB emphasised on tech business, data analytics, and entrepreneurship, thereby also creating a niche for itself. It also assisted and mentored two newly established IIMs during their inception period - IIM Trichy in 2011, and IIM Visakhapatnam in 2015. It earned the reputation of being the most tranparent B-School in India, and by 2023 it was the only IIM among top four which had complied with the legal requirements of independent review and public reporting. As of 2025, IIM Bangalore was the only Indian B-School in GNAM, an international collaboration convened by the Yale School of Management.
Motto and logo
The official motto of the institute is the Sanskrit phrase तेजस्वि नावधीतमस्तु, and was adopted in the session 1991-92. It is pronounced as as per the IPA phonetic transcription; and is romanised as as per the IAST, ALA-LC, UNRSGN, and ISO 15919 standards, or as tejasvi naavdhiitamastu as per the ASCII schemes of ITRANS and Velthuis both. It is a Sanskrit Shloka extracted from the Shanti Mantra invocated in the Taittiriya Upanishad, and the Katha Upanishad, two of the constituent texts of the Yajurveda. The motto translates to "Let our study be enlightening".The IIMB's official logo is a depiction of the top-half of a blazing sun with stylised rays prominently emanating from it. The image is in the style of a negative space picture with intense red colour in the background of rays, while the sun, rays, and other space in logo are in white colour. The text "IIMB" is written in black in the centre of the depicted sun, and the Sanskrit motto is written in black below the sun. It was designed by the National Institute of Design, and was adopted in 1994. The hue of red colour in the logo is also used as the de facto official colour of IIMB.
A secondary celebratory logo was designed to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of IIMB. It was released on the 28 December 2022, before the beginning of Golden Jubilee celebrations scheduled in the academic session 2023-24. It was used for activities marking the semicentennial occasion, like the event cover released by the India Post, and the Golden Jubilee Week events from 26 to 29 October 2023.
Campus
IIMB's main campus is located on the Bannerghatta Road in Bilekahalli suburb in the southern part of the metro-city of Bangalore. It occupies an area of around 105 acres, and has a non-urban feel with ample greenery. As of 2025, IIMB was setting up a 110-acre second campus 20 km away near Jigani, in the city's periphery, in Anekal Taluka of the Bangalore Urban district.The campus is accessible by private or public transport from anywhere in the city via bike, car, taxi, or bus. A namesake 'IIMB' bus-stop is served adequately by the BMTC, and is 13 km from the integrated Kempegowda Bus Station. The campus is 13 km from KSR City Junction, 13 km from Cantt. Railway Station, and 44 km from Kempegowda International Airport. A metro station named 'IIMB' on Pink Line is planned to be launched in March 2026.
Architecture
The design of IIMB campus was led by the famous architect B.V. Doshi,, the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate, RIBA 2022 Royal Gold Medal recipient, and Padma Bhushan awardee. He had worked with the pioneering architect Le Corbusier in Paris, and had later assisted the renowned architect Louis Kahn, in designing IIMA buildings. He had also founded and designed the School of Architecture in 1966. His firm, the erstwhile M/s Stein, Doshi, & Bhalla was commissioned to design the campus. The design was inspired by the 16th-century historic city of Fatehpur Sikri near Agra, and the 13th-century Meenakshi Temple in Madurai, along with the lush gardens of Bangalore, also known as the Garden City of India. The first director, N.S. Ramaswamy, had asked Doshi to create a campus to reflect the ethos of the Bangalore city - "green and alive ".Light and Environment were the cornerstones of the poly-nuclear design, a hybrid of Indian traditional architecture and principles of Team 10 modernists. The notable architectural elements include the high passageways, trellises, open quadrangles with space for greenery, sunlight beaming in through the pergolas, semi-open corridors, geometrical roofs, rough texture finish, and Kota-stone flooring. The design is such that "an interplay of walls-n-openings, lights-n-shadows, and solids-n-voids changes the character of the main building during different times of the day... ". The 54,000 sq-m original complex is built of hand-chipped granite stonemasonry, and exposed concrete. The campus design began in 1977, and the construction of buildings was finished in 1983. The greening effort started later in 1991, and by the 2020s the campus had a green cover of 62 acres with around 30,000 trees, and 50+ ground re-charge wells. Subsequent buildings, like the 6,500 sq-m New Classroom Complex, were designed by Sanjay Mohe's Mindspace Architects.
The IIMB campus design has won accolades globally. The 'T' ranked it 17th in their list of The 25 Most Significant Works of Post War Architecture. When Dezeen asked thirteen top Indian architecture firms to list their favourite building, IIMB was the only building chosen by more than one, and called it "the most influential piece of modern architecture". The famous architectural historian and critic William J.R. Curtis labelled the IIMB campus as a "model" for educational institutions. The institutional project also finds mention in the citation of the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize for Doshi. The Architectural Digest India included IIMB in the list of 6 Educational Institutions in India with Exceptional Architecture. The GQ magazine ranked it #2 in the list of 7 Most Beautiful Universities and Scenic Campuses.