Ankush Kochhar, Sachin Jose Varghese, and Shashank Awasthi, from IIM-B’s one-year MBA, the Executive Post Graduate Programme in Management (EPGP), were adjudged runners-up at Biz-2-Biz, a B2B marketing competition at ISB’s flagship event, Advaita. The competition saw participation from about 500 teams from India and abroad.
The finale, held at ISB’s Hyderabad campus, witnessed six teams from ISB, IIM-B, Narsee Monjee and other premier management colleges battle it out. The team from ISB won, and IIM-B’s team stood second.
Udaan, the B2B trading platform that sponsored the event, presented real world challenges to the contestants. Competing teams could choose one problem statement from a given set of three. The problem statement chosen by the IIM-B team was of market development for Udaan.
The company currently has a retail base of about 3million kirana stores across 900 cities in India. While it is successfully solving the back-end issues of these stores, the consumer facing part has remained largely ignored. Teams in the challenge were asked to come up with unique solutions to help the kirana store owners deploy new-age technologies to compete with chain grocery and departmental stores that are rapidly establishing a dominant footprint across India. IIM-B’s team came up with a unique bouquet of digital solutions to achieve this objective.
The team says it used the opportunity to discover various nuances of the B2B market, in general, and Udaan’s business model, in particular. The runners-up were awarded a cash prize of ₹20,000.