Ideas Exchange At Mdi

Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon, will be organising Delphique'03, a national management convention on November 21-22, 2003.

Attempting to establish a forum for interaction and exchange of ideas between business leaders and management students, Delphique will have six panel discussions spanning the functional areas of strategy, finance, human resources, information technology, supply chain management and branding.

Convention speakers include Arun Maira, chairman, BCG India; Aditya Narayan, chairman, ICI India Ltd; Shekhar Das Gupta, country manager, Oracle India; Prem Kamath, director, human resources, HLL; Vadlamani Srinivas, CFO, Satyam; Santosh Desai, president, McCann-Erickson; and Prasanna Kumar, India head, logistics, Delphi.

The event will also feature a B-school paper-writing competition sponsored by KSA Technopak.

Management talk at IIT

IIT Delhi is bringing together the government, business and academia to deliberate on "Building India Incorporation: vision 2010".

The seminar, organised by the institute's department of management studies, will be held on November 13-14, 2003, and will consist of six sessions: creating global brands, developing human capital for corporate India, manufacturing: return of the prodigal, emergence of financial services in India, IT-tapping the Indian market, and telecom industry in India: the next step.

Planning Commission chairman K C Pant will inaugurate the conference which will be addressed by, among others, Rajendra Singh, advisor, TRAI; Ben Gaucherin, CTO-Worldwide Sapient Technologies; Rakesh Malhotra, COO, Ebony Retail Holdings; Kapil Mehta, VP-business development, Max New York Life Insurance; Prof M Y Khan, faculty, Delhi University; and S V Raman,VP-systems, Cisco India.

For information contact: Dr R K Baisya, head of department, 26857787, 26591171

Mela with a difference

Market research conjures up images of door-to-door questioning, of hard rather than smart work. But often, the results of the survey fail to reflect the buying behaviour of the consumers. Is there a way out, or is this one of those "process errors" that you live with and provide for?

Students and professors of the Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow, came up with a solution to all these woes in the year 1994.

This was in the form of an event they called Index (Information through disguised Experimentation). It is a marketing fair where the information sought through the questionnaires is disguised in the form of games, which the respondents play.

The respondents think they are just participating in some elaborate skit, and they let their guard down in the fun of the moment.

The games are designed in such a way that the observers can elicit all the required information just by observing and noting down the behaviour and the responses of the participants.

In the last nine years, Index has become huge. It began as an in-campus event involving staff and faculty families as respondents.

Over the last three years, it has reached into the heart of Lucknow city, drawing crowds of close to 25,000.

Now, through Index, IIM Lucknow executes market research projects for industry bigwigs like HLL, P&G, Nestle, Cadbury's, Coke, Pepsi, Asian Paints, RCI, Britannia and Titan. The event is scheduled for 15-16 November 2003.

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