BS Best B-School Project Award: Five entries shortlisted for finals today

A power-packed jury has shortlisted five entries of the top 15 projects for the Business Standard Best B-School Project Award 2019. These will compete for the coveted award in the final round to be held in Mumbai on Wednesday.

The jury comprises Rediff.com Founder and Chairman Ajit Balakrishnan (chairman of the jury), BSE MD and CEO Ashishkumar Chauhan, McKinsey & Company senior partner Rajat Gupta, Axis Bank human resources head Rajkamal Vempati, former Hindustan Petroleum Corporation CMD Nishi Vasudeva, Brand-building.com founder Ambi Parameswaran, and CG Power's global head of internal audit and HR Sunil Panjwani. 

The shortlisted entries include a project on credit risk assessment using market intelligence and a loan default prediction model by Ayush Trivedi from Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development, Pune, for Samunnati Financial Intermediation, and another on identifying the ideal picking, storage and routing policy for a hyperlocal service warehouse at Flipkart by Kapil Gavali of National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai, and one on route train by Vivek Sathiamoorthy of XIME, Chennai for BMW. 

Other projects in the fray include one on sales and marketing techniques for Titan’s Skinn perfume in large format stores by G Teja from Vinod Gupta School of Management at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a project on customer sentiment analysis by Ankur Aman of Management Development Institute, Murshidabad, for Deloitte.

The criteria used by the jury to shortlist the projects included the quality of research and analysis, problems or issues being addressed practicality of the solution and how innovative it is, apart from the problem being addressed. 

Each of the finalists will make a presentation to the jury members at the awards function and the top three will be chosen.

Business Standard instituted these awards in 2007 to honour excellence among students from India’s best B-schools. 

A national level competition, the award is an opportunity for B-schools to nominate one project by their students as part of their academics. Starting with 68 entries in the first year, the number of projects has steadily grown to 174 this year.