XIMB's Wins Cognizant's Boardroom: Smart Business Plan Contest, 2008

Shikha Agarwal, Chaitali Roy and Sudeep Vaidya from the Xavier’s Institute of Management, Bhubaneshwar (XIMB) won the finals of Boardroom 2008, a Smart Business Plan Contest organized by IT and BPO major Cognizant for B-Schools across India and Asia Pacific. The runners-up were Kaushik Ramakrishnan, Prashant Purushottam and Sarang Malik from Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. The winning team from XIMB, which called itself “The Alexandrian Warriors”, received a cash prize of Rs. 250,000, while the runners-up “Project O3” team from ISB received Rs 150,000.

The finals of Boardroom 2008 were held on November 21, 2008, at Cognizant’s techno-complex in Pune. The other finalists included teams from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B), Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C), and Indian Institute of Management, Indore (IIM-I).

Aimed at promoting a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation among the management students across B-schools in India and the Asia Pacific region, Cognizant had launched the Boardroom: Smart Business Plan Contest in 2007. The contest, held in four phases spanning two months, provides a unique opportunity to budding management students across B-schools to get creative, propose new business avenues for Cognizant, and draw up a business plan on what they think should be Cognizant’s next move for growth, differentiation and leadership.

For the preliminary rounds this year, Cognizant received about 400 entries from students of B-Schools across India and the Asia Pacific region. Of them, 15 were shortlisted for the semi-finals. The semi-finalists included teams from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A); Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B); Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C); Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (IIM-L); Indian Institute of Management, Indore (IIM-I); Indian Institute of Management, Kanpur (IIM-K); Indian School of Business (ISB); Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI); Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT); Xavier’s Institute of Management, Bhubaneshwar (XIMB); National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), and S P Jain Center of Management, Singapore.

Cognizant’s senior management members and domain experts with substantial experience “mentored” the shortlisted teams for about two weeks on various aspects of their business plan and global business issues, and introduced them to the dynamics of the corporate world—a unique feature of B-Plan contests.

“The B-Plan contest provided a platform for the students to learn what it takes to successfully grow a business, reckoning all aspects of business across strategy, competitive dynamics, financials, marketing and operations,” said R Chandrasekaran, President and Managing Director, Cognizant, who himself is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore. “Cognizant has always fostered a spirit of entrepreneurship within the organization and this has been the key to its success. This contest not only provided a unique opportunity to budding management students across B-schools to get creative and propose new business avenues for Cognizant, but also gave us an outside-in perspective of an important stakeholder—the management student community. The contest also helped us expand our network of stakeholders, which holds the key to knowledge management and collaboration in the Web 2.0 era.”