A four-member team from IIM Ranchi won the hard-fought grand finale of the third edition of the BLoC Boardroom Challenge. They took home the BusinessLine CXO of the Year title. SPJIMR and ISB Hyderabad were the first and second runners-up. There were eight B-school teams that slugged it out to win the contest held at Madras Management Association in Chennai on October 14.
Case studies form an integral part of management education and, in this particular competition, the participants had to come up with strategies to ensure the wider adoption of mutual funds as a savings and investment instrument across the country. The top three teams won ₹1 lakh, ₹75,000 and ₹50,000 respectively, from BusinessLine .
Shubham Garg, from IIM Ranchi, said, "This was a great learning experience as it involved a field segment where we had to go out and talk to people."
KS Sivaraman, from the SPJIMR team, said, "If we compare the semi-final and the final case, the biggest difference was that we had a structured answer. But this was an open-ended case study where we had to think a lot." He added that none of the teammates understood the finer details of mutual funds. "While trying to understand the case, we have actually understood the industry. Some of my team members who have not invested in mutual funds are now interested to do so," Sivaraman said.
Nimisha Jain, from ISB, said the finals case, in stark contrast to the semi-final, was less numbers-driven and required more imaginative thinking and ideation.