Teams from IIM Ahmedabad swept the two top spots at the Mumbai semi-finals of the BLoC Boardroom Challenge, presented by apparel brand Indian Terrain, held at the campus of SP Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR).
Siddharth Shankar Ravichandran, Anandaramakrishnan Srinivasan and Prakalp Mehta were declared the winners while Swapnil Bhandarkar, Abhinav Singh, Saurabh Bansal, also from IIM-A, were the runners-up. The winning team will now go on to the grand finale of the Boardroom Challenge to be held in Chennai on September 11.
The jury comprised Raju Bhinge, Chairman Infiniti Retail Ltd, which runs the Croma chain, Renuka Kamath, Professor of Marketing, SPJIMR and Vinay Kamath, Associate Editor, BusinessLine .
The teams presented their strategies on how brand Nokia could make a successful re-entry into a highly competitive Indian mobile phone market. The other teams in the fray were from SPJIMR, NIBM, SRBS, Welingkar Institute, and IES MCRC.
Speaking to the students on the presentations, Renuka Kamath said a jury expects groups to stick to the brief that was given. She pointed out that most B-schoolers tend to use a lot of theoretical frameworks; some presentations had Porter's framework, strategy diamond, SWOT analysis, and so on. "It's nice to use frameworks, but what really was missing is what is the juice that is coming out of it," she said. She cautioned the students that they would soon be joining organisations and not to make presentations that spew too much theory. "People will be looking at the stuff you have, not at the frameworks," she added. B-schoolers need to use their intuition and judgement but also need to validate their findings with people outside the system, she emphasised.
One of the things that stood out for the winning team, she said, is that they made a choice and took the jury through why they made that choice. "Strategising is all about making choices. The winning team was clear about how they were going to achieve that and how they intend to reach their target."
Jury member Raju Bhinge urged the teams to stick to the case facts and the problem statement and also to keep a reality check on their submissions. He told the B-schoolers, who would soon enter corporate life, to keep in mind three trends that would completely redefine existing businesses. One is the digital wave and the rapid movement to an 'app' world; the other is the growth of renewable energy which could completely upend the thermal power generating industry and the third is the move towards electric vehicles. Europe has declared that it would completely move to electric vehicles by 2040. This would have a profound effect on the existing industry, he said, including auto component makers and this, in turn, could impact jobs in this industry.
The winning team from IIM-A will compete in the finals with teams from PSG Institute of Management (Coimbatore); SIBM (Bengaluru); LIBA (Chennai); ISB (Hyderabad) and IIT Delhi's DMS.