The second set of Semi-Finals of the BLoC Boardroom Challenge was held in Hyderabad and Coimbatore on Wednesday. While PSG institute of Management hosted the event in Coimbatore, the contest was held in the offices of The Hindu BusinessLine in Hyderabad.
Teams from the Indian School of Business (ISB) dominated the Hyderabad round of the Boardroom Challenge semi-finals hosted by BusinessLine on Campus (BLoC), winning the first and second spots.
Six teams from the city qualified for the event, which was judged by a panel consisting of Ramesh Loganathan, Professor Co-Innovation and Head Research Outreach at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) and K Vijay Kumar, Managing Director, KVK Energy & Infrastructure.
The teams presented their strategies on how brand Nokia could make a successful re-entry into the Indian mobile phone market. The IIT Hyderabad team of engineering students also made a strong presentation.
Commenting on the presentations, Ramesh Loganathan felt the teams showed risk aversion and little out-of-the-box thinking while making their case. The teams should have also come up with product innovations and marketing strategies to make their arguments solid.
He said the teams also stuck to incremental development moves rather than radical and seemed to get bogged down with unnecessary constraints. In a market which is crowded and where the opposition is armed with big budgets for advertising, though the brand was strong it needed innovative thinking to make a dent or create a niche again.
Vijay Kumar of KVK Energy said the going for his company has become tougher with the power sector facing challenges on the coal and gas linkage fronts. Several projects were stuck and needed skillful handling of resources and manpower to keep things going. He urged students to choose sectors and areas which had big potential in the future.
The winners and the runners-up were both from ISB, Hyderabad. Those in the winning team were Anirudh Vasudevan, Nikhil Das and Saloni Mehta, while the runners-up were Surbhi Sachdeva, Priyanka Venugopal, Simrat Bir and Rohit Mohan.
Coimbatore teams
In Coimbatore, the jury comprised executive coach and trainer S Siva Kumar, Abhilasha Anish, Head, Brand Marketing, The Hindu Group, and Dr Arul Rajan, Associate Professor at PSGIM.
While S Siva Kumar spoke about the importance of being creative and focused in tackling any business problem, Abilasha, said the teams need to understand the objective of a case study even before beginning to work on a solution.
The participants from PSGIM were declared the winners. The team comprised A Susaritha, M Suresh, S Dinesh, CB Vignesh.
The runners-up, from Bharatidasan Institute of Management, Trichy, were S Sundarachozhan, Balaji R and Praveen Kumar S.
The winning teams from ISB and PSGIM will compete in the BLoC Boardroom Challenge finals to be held in Chennai on September 11.