The trio of Rahul Bikka, Nagaraju Dudipala, and Dheeraj Banda from IIM Bangalore (IIMB) won the Bengaluru leg of the BLoC Boardroom Challenge semi-finals 2021. It was a clean sweep for IIMB as the runner-up was also from IIMB. The team comprised Natasha Tanwar and Madhu Sudhan.
The jury members for the Bengaluru semi-finals were KS Rao, Senior Vice President & Head, Investor Education & Distribution Development, Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC Ltd; Vishwadeep Kuila of Brand Vectors; and Anuj Kapoor, Assistant Professor, IIM Ahmedabad.
A team from the Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Ghaziabad, with Sabari Santosh S, Priyam Juneja, and Dhruv Aggarwal, won the Delhi leg of the challenge, while a duo from BIMTECH Delhi, Anushree Sarkar and Soumya Mukherjee, came second. Tanmay Agarwal, Vice-President & Head-Global Business Services, Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Ltd, along with KS Rao and Kuila, were the jury members for the Delhi semi-finals.
Siddharth Bhatt, Sanjay Singh, and Trishla Chauhan, a trio from Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai, won this leg of the challenge. Shrivatsan Balagopal, Prashanth Chandrasekaran, and Sharath Sriram from IIM Trichy (Chennai campus) finished second. The jury members for the Chennai semi-finals were KS Rao, Anuj Kapoor, and S Sivakumar, an executive coach.
Vijay Balaji KS and Arun Prasad, a duo from SIBM Pune, won the Pune leg of the challenge. The contest featured three teams in the Pune round, and Prakhar Agarwal and Hardik Soni from IIM Nagpur finished second. The jury for the semi-finals comprised S Sivakumar, and Deepak Jain, Founder Director, American Academy of Financial Management.
The students had to present how an FMCG company, Innovative Home Care Pvt Ltd (IHCPL), can break into the toilet soaps category, and discuss marketing strategies to gain substantial turnover and be profitable in a fiercely competitive market. The case was set by Brand Vectors’ Kuila, an IIMA alumnus.
The teams were scored on their understanding and analysis of the case, the case solution, their presentations and also on teamwork. Each city’s winning team will now meet the winners of the semi-finals from seven other cities in the finals. The jury said that none of the teams from the Coimbatore round qualified for the finals.
The winning team stands to win ₹1 lakh, the runners-up ₹75,000 and the third placed team ₹50,000. The fifth edition of the BLoC Boardroom Challenge 2021 is sponsored by Aditya Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund and powered by Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt Ltd while Punjab National Bank is an associate sponsor. The knowledge partners are Brand Vectors and Potential Genesis.