Excel Entertainment, Farhan Akhtar's Company, a Case Study at Harvard

They have churned out some good cinema over the years. Now Farhan Akhtar and childhood friend and business partner Ritesh Sidhwani have taken their company, Excel Entertainment, where no other Indian film house has been before — into the classrooms of Harvard Business School.

The production house behind Dil Chahta Hai, Rock On!!, Lakshya, Don, and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara has become the first Indian film company to be the subject of an HBS case study, to be taught to second-year MBA students in January–February 2013. HBS cases travel: they are sold through Harvard Business Publishing and taught by professors at management schools around the world.

The road to Cambridge ran through a conference stage. Sidhwani was invited to speak on the "Business of Entertainment" panel at the Harvard India Conference 2012, held March 24–25 in Boston under the theme "India — The Next Frontier." His keynote panel discussion gave the school an insight it decided to take further.

Faculty lead on the case was Associate Professor Mukti Khaire, who flew down from Boston for a week in Mumbai, working closely with Namrata Arora, associate director of the Harvard University South Asia Initiative. The research involved extensive interviews with Farhan, Sidhwani, and key members of the Excel team — the mechanics of how a Mumbai production house built a brand on new-style, quality-driven filmmaking.

"It's a huge honour for any organisation," Sidhwani said. For an industry often analyzed through box-office tables, having its business model dissected in a Boston classroom is a different kind of opening weekend.