This morning, the five finalist B-school teams waited anxiously to present their projects to the jury. With topics ranging from human resource to tackling corruption in the country, the students had made the final cut from 154 entries. The occasion: Business Standard’s Best B-school project award. The chief guest was Union Minister of Water Resources Salman Khurshid.
Ashwini Vasudevan, a student of Mumbai-based L N Welingkar Institute Of Management Development and Research bagged the first position.
Vasudevan’s project was titled, ‘Music, Memes & Me’ where she explored the idea of how music and memes can help employees perform better and increase their motivational level from 15 per cent to 40 per cent.
The award is a national level competition where a B-school nominates the best B-school project work by its students during the academic year, as part of their curriculum.
The process, which started in September 2010 across the country, had shortlisted 15 teams. Only five were selected in the final round after the students made presentations before the jury.
The panel included Chief Commercial Officer of Reliance Retail Madhavan Ganesan; VP Power Systems (Asia) Crompton Greaves Jayant Kulkarni; Chairman of Accel Media and Director of BCCL A P Parigi; Gupta Leader of Enterprise Application, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Joydeep Datta and Executive Vice President, Head Marketing and Direct Channels, HDFC Life Sanjay Tripathy.
A team from Deloitte and Touche Consulting short-listed the five projects from the 154 entries. “Shortlisting 15 projects from an entry of 154 projects was an interesting experience. But the five of the 15 were short-listed because of their intellectual firepower, and how they managed to tailor their content to a set of senior industry audience,” said Satish Raghavendran, vice president, Deloitte Research.
The teams were evaluated on four parameters — rigour, innovative approach, structure of the content and final presentation. The final five projects that were selected appealed to the jury as they dealt with macro issues and came up with meaningful solutions.
“The winner clearly touched a softer subject that falls under the human resource purview but was one of the biggest issues for corporate India today. Issues related to employees stress is an important dynamic that the industry is facing,” said Jayant Kulkarni, vice president of Power Systems (Asia), Crompton Greaves.
Vidhyasagari Sundaram and Hitesh Jain, of Great Lakes Institute of Management and Research, Chennai won the second position. Sundaram and Jain’s project was about data development models for selecting supplier-bids in an E-procurement situation.
Harpreet Singh, a student of Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi, won the third prize. Singh’s project provided a Roadmap for Franchisee Development to JRG Securities, a brokerage firm.
According to Sanjay Tripathy, executive vice-presiden marketing and direct channels, HDFC Life: “The key is how students can concise their presentation and make it detailed but also crisp at the same time. Also, how original is the idea, is also important. It is interesting to know what the new generation thinks and the kind of ideas they are coming up with.”
The other two presentations short-listed were beverage wholesale activation by Samir Khandelwal of Institute Of Management Indore and evaluation of a corruption-free India (Indian Institute of Politics and Anti Corruption Helpline) by Daniel De Luna, Nikhil Mudaliar, Ravi Yadav, Saurabh Singh, Shantanu Shekhar and Udit Kumar Goyal of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. IIM-A won the consolation prize.
