The runners up were Vinit Kumar Sharma, Vishal Gandhi and Ruchir Mishra from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), Delhi. The cash prize for the winning team was Rs. 200,000 and the runners-up, Rs 100,000.
The top seven short-listed teams were from the following institutes: Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad; Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Ghaziabad; Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), Delhi, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Mumbai; Goa Institute of Management (GIM), Goa, and Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM), Pune.
Aimed at promoting a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation among spirit among the management students across B-schools in the Asia Pacific region, Cognizant, for the first time, launched the Board Room: Smart Business Plan Contest, 2007. The finals ware held on Friday, November 30, 2007, in the company's Thoraipakkam premises.
The contest, in four phases, spanning two months, provided opportunity to budding management students across B-schools to get creative, propose new business avenues for Cognizant, and draw up a business plan on what they think should be Cognizant's next move for growth, differentiation and leadership.
In the preliminary rounds, Cognizant received about 400 entries from students from B-Schools across the Asia Pacific region. Of these, 114 entries were found eligible and 20 were short listed. Of the 20 entries short listed, those from the National University of Singapore and S.P.Jain Center of Management, also made it to the semifinals.
Cognizant's senior management members and domain experts with substantial experience "mentored" the short-listed teams for about two weeks on various aspects of their business plan, global business issues and introduced to the dynamics of the corporate world—a unique feature in B-Plan contests.
"The B-Plan contest provided a platform for the students to learn what it takes to successfully grow a business reckoning all aspects of business across strategy, competitive dynamics, financials, marketing and operations" said IIM B alumnus and President and Managing Director of Cognizant R Chandrasekaran. "Cognizant has always fostered a spirit of entrepreneurship within the organization and this has been the key to its success. This contest not only provided a unique opportunity to budding management students across B-schools to get creative and propose new business avenues for Cognizant, but also gave us an outside-in perspective from an important stake-holder—the management student community. It also helped us to expand our network of stakeholders, the key to knowledge management and collaboration in the Web 2.0 era," he added.
