Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM Ahmedabad) hosted the Hult Prize 2016, a pan-India event on January 9, to address the start-up ecosystem. This event showcased the top 30 shortlisted business ideas, coming from such premier institutes as IIM Ahmedabad, ISB Hyderabad, Sri Ram College of Commerce, IIM Calcutta and IIT Kharagpur.
The top five teams will proceed to compete at the international level, with regional finals slated to happen in March in Dubai, Shanghai, London, San Francisco, and Boston, respectively.
The event witnessed industry veterans, such as Sushma Rajagopalan, MD and CEO of ITC Infotech; Rahul Singh, President of HCL Financial Services; Ramon Magsaysay awardee Anshu Gupta, and Bawa Grover, Head of the Indian Customer Satisfaction Index, among others, as jury members.
Kapil Sharma, Director of SocioCross, said: “Traditionally, the NGO model, that seemed a perfect fit for most significant social problems, has not been quite effective from the sustainability aspect, based on various studies conducted. It is only a part of a grant that reaches the beneficiaries. Very few NGOs across the globe could function efficiently.
The “Hult Prize” was started in 2009 by Ahmad Ashkar, alumni of Hult International Business School to find answers to some of the world’s pressing issues. Today the “Hult Prize” is world’s largest student competition, one of the top idea-sourcing platforms across the globe and is held in association with the Clinton Global Initiative.”
Every year, former US President Bill Clinton picks up one of the most pressing global issues such as food, water, health, sanitation and many others and invites the best brains from 150 countries and more than 600 universities to come up with a business idea that not only resolves the crisis under consideration but is also sustainable. The team with the winning idea walks away with $1 million to turn their idea into reality.
Prof Amit Karna, Chairperson of IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), said: “At CIIE, our objective has always been to nurture awesome start-ups. We feel that initiatives such as the Hult Prize can actually provide an opportunity for students to come up with innovative solutions to many social problems that we as a nation continue to face. These teams have been selected from the cream of the crop, and we sincerely hope that they decide to take the plunge into entrepreneurship and convert their solutions into commercial products and services..”
Hult Prize PAN India Student Directors Bipul Saha and Ashar Khan, both second-year students of IIM Ahmedabad, played a pivotal role in organising the event on campus and helped students come up with innovate ideas to solve some of the world’s biggest social issues.
“With Nanohealth from ISB winning the prestigious Hult Prize in the 2014 edition, this year we have witnessed a huge change in the mind-set of students from top institutes of India and there is a huge spurt in the participation from India in this wave of social entrepreneurship,” said Raj Bordia, Director of Hult Prize India.