The Indian School of Business plans to get accreditation from the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business as it hopes to increase the number of foreign students, besides focusing on undertaking quality research.

"We have applied for the accreditation and are hopeful of getting it in two to three years, since the process is a long drawn one. The accreditation would go a long way in helping the School attract more foreign students," Indian School of Business Dean M Rammohan Rao said.

Currently, foreign students constitute one per cent of the total strength at ISB and Rao is hopeful of increasing this to 15-20 per cent over the next few years.

The School has a strength of 418 students, which would be maintained for a couple of years before expanding the number to 560.

"Going by the response ISB has received, we may look at admitting students bi-annually instead of the current practice of conducting admissions once a year. However, we would not want to scale up the student count and would see how we split the numbers," Rao added.

Also on the School's agenda is increasing its in-house faculty. Currently, 75 per cent of the faculty at ISB is visiting and the rest, in-house.

"When we started, we had only visiting faculty, but now the number of in-house faculty is increasing. Over the next few years, we would want to achieve an ideal ratio of 50:50 in terms of visiting and in-house faculty," Rao said.

Wanting to position itself as a research driven institution, Rao said ISB would start new courses besides opening two more centres of excellence - Centre for Strategic Marketing and Centre for Leadership and Change Management, within a year's time.

The school already has four centres namely the Centre for Analytical Finance, Centre for Global Logistics and Manufacturing Strategies, Centre for IT and Networked Economy and Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurial Development.

Rao said apart from taking steps to strengthen the academic environment of the School, focus would also be laid on developing a sound financial position for itself.

"We are looking at developing an endowment fund so that we do not rely just on tuition fees and grants. We are exploring other funding options, which would help us achieve our goal to become a premier research institution," he said.