The theme of the fifth edition of Solaris, organised by the students of IIM-U, was ‘Success Through Synergy.’ After the speakers at the Leadership Summit and IIM-U Director Janat Shah inaugurated the event, Prof Shah, Kunal Jeswani, CEO at Ogilvy India, Lt. Gen Satish Dua, PVSM, UYSM, SM, VSM. (Retd.) and Sanjog Gupta, Executive Vice-President at Star, India, took part in a discussion that provided rich insights and learnings from their varied experiences as part of the Leadership Summit, the flagship event of IIM-U’s Solaris.
Manish Godha, CEO and founder of Advaiya, and G Ramachandran, Founder CreaSakti, were a part of Samvadya, the consulting summit, while Maneesh Dangi, Co-Chief Investment Officer at Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC, P Rakesh, President, Financial markets, YES Bank, and Sandeep Upadhyay, MD, Centrum Infrastructure Advisory, shared their knowledge with students as part of Arth-Samvaad, The Finance Summit.
Operations summit
Solaris ’19 started with Unmesh , the Operations Summit, which hosted Ranag Davala, who spoke about the significance of Synergy and the impact it has had in his career. This was followed by Antar-Drishti, the Economics Summit, which saw Dr. Shubhada Rao, Chief Economist at YES Bank give an enriching talk, linking the disruption in supply to the impact of technology on policy-making.
This was followed by a useful session on learnings from the structural economic slowdown and the twin shocks of Demonetisation and GST implementation by Dr VK Vijaykumar, Chief Economic Strategist at Geojit. The final speaker of the summit was Akshat Kumar, Director of Investments at Klay Capital.
The day ended with Savannah, the Marketing Summit of Solaris ’19. AL Jagannath, Senior Director, DELL-EMC alliance, talked about brand building, importance of communication, marketing strategies and user experience, and how the combination of appropriate policies, tactics, and execution methods can help in achieving optimum results.
Vishal Rupani, Co-Founder and CEO, Canvas, talked about how the combination of positive synergy and collaboration leads to marketing excellence, also shedding light on augmented reality, creative thinking, and following an experiential and interactive approach for brand creation.
Using data for personalisation
The summit ended with a panel discussion, with speakers discussing how consumers love content, and the need to keep it as interesting as possible. They also shared the value of using data as a means of personalisation for consumers while interacting with the students during the questionnaire.
Sponsored by Secure Meters, Solaris included events and competitions for the students, namely, Vaad-Vivad, Mind-Wizz, Ops-Samasya, Auctionnaire, Saudagar, Vitt-Sangram, and Arohan. These interactive and engaging events pitched the students against one another in simulations of real-life situations, making them think on their feet.
Prominent brands including State Bank of India (economics and finance summit partner), Zomato (food partner), TiE Udaipur (networking partner), ExpertHub (innovation partner), Advaiya (consulting summit partner), Union Bank of India (associate partner) and Seasons Park Resort (Hospitality partner) provided support to Solaris 2019.
Solaris was initiated by IIM Udaipur to help students interact with industry leaders and gain rich learnings from their knowledge and experience. Indian Institute of Management Udaipur has always been committed towards the holistic growth of its students, and via Solaris, aims to groom them into future leaders. Recently, IIM Udaipur became the youngest school in the world to be on the Financial Times Masters in Management Ranking 2019.