The Hult Prize has recently announced the winning team from Indian Institute of Management Indore that has advanced to the 2019 regional finals of the competition.
The Hult Prize is a crowdsourcing platform for social good. It identifies and launches disruptive and catalytic social ventures that aim to solve the planet’s most pressing challenges. This year, the Hult Prize is focussed on finding solutions for the millions of people around the world affected by unemployment, primarily the youth who lack skills and opportunities.
The winning team from IIM Indore is Team Dreamers and Seekers, consisting of Kuhu Krishna (Patna), Aishwarya Gupta (Mumbai), Urvashi Saboo (Sehore), and Prateek Kumar (Dehradun).
The team competed in the Hult Prize at the IIM Indore event on November 28 and built a solution to this year’s challenge, Global Youth Unemployment Challenge. They briefly describe their idea as follows: “In India, every year, numerous traditional craftsmen and indigenous producers migrate to big cities in search of daily-wage labour, just so they can feed their families. Every day is a struggle for them and centuries-old traditional grassroot knowledge that has survived generations dies in the brawl of an urban slum. This is where our venture comes in. We are ‘Dharohar’ — which translates to ‘heritage’ and we believe that the pride of India actually lies in its culture and heritage. We aim to create a multi-faceted platform with two major goals: Upskilling the youth and bridging the gap between the maker and the consumer.”
The team will now move on to compete at the Hult Prize regional finals in March 2018, which are being hosted around the world across 25 cities.
Following the regional finals, one team from each host city will advance into an intensive, eight-week summer business incubator, where they will receive mentorship, advisory and strategic planning as they create prototypes and set-up to launch their new social business. The final round of competition will take place in September 2019, where a jury panel will select the Hult Prize winner, who will receive $1,000,000.