Till last year, the first-year curriculum of a Ph.D. programme was a copy of a postgraduate programme in management, but IIM-B and IIM Lucknow introduced courses in research methodology and structural modelling in 2009, while XLRI did the same a year earlier. In institutions such as U.S. based Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, research is given the priority and the course is designed to train students for careers as leading researchers and scholars. INSEAD, which takes some 20 Ph.D. students every year at its campuses in Singapore and Fontainebleau, France.

Academic salaries have become increasingly competitive with INSEAD graduates commanding an average starting salary of around 7.55 million a year. Contradictory to these, in the last few years, virtually every Ph.D. student at IIM-B has taken up a corporate job - three out of four in 2009, six out of eight in 2008 and seven out of eight in 2007. Now, understanding the demand of the research, IIMs are insisting students to get into academics at the time of entry itself. Gopal Naik, Chairperson, Fellow Programme in management, IIM-B said, "We hope that 70-80 percent of students would take to academics in another five years or so." IIM-B has also set a target for students to produce two research papers of publishing quality during the duration of the course.

XLRI has increased travel grants and gives monetary rewards for publication in internationally reputed journals. The difference of quality between Indian and International B-schools, is also reflected in the survey done by The Economist and The Financial Times. In the survey done by The Economist magazine's '2009 full-time MBA ranking, only one Indian B-school is among the world's top 100 - IIM Ahmedabad at 99 and in the survey of The Financial Times' 'Global MBA rankings 2010', only one Indian B-school in its list of 99 - Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, at 12.