ISB students win $ 75,000

Team Innova makes history by coming second in the Innovation

Setting benchmarks, winning accolades and moving on to scale newer heights - this has become a habit for Indian School of Business. It is this spirit that took team Innova, comprising five students of class 2008, all the way to Darden Graduate School of Business, Virginia to participate in Idea Crossing's 5th Annual Innovation Challenge.

Innovation Challenge is the largest competition of its kind in the world, which attracts hundreds of teams from the top MBA programmes worldwide to solve real world business challenges faced by big global brands. The problems posed to all the teams are the same, so innovation is the keyword if you want to stand out.

Prashant Goel, Sushant Bhansali, Pushkar Jain, Meghna Rao and Nishant Pandey roughed it out in a competition that attracted 1,200 participants from 57 countries and beat over 270 teams from all over the world to become the ‘2nd most innovative team in the world'.

"We lost the first place to The University of North CarolinaKenan Flagler by just two marks. It was a close call," says Meghna, who is still beaming at the fact that their team made history at ISB by bringing back a trophy from Darden apart from winning the prize money - a neat sum of $ 75,000.

Prashant, the leader of the team feels that getting shortlisted among the top 10 groups was their first milestone. "The global bigwigs we got to brainstorm for this year was an interesting mix, Harley Davidson, Hilton Hotels and American Express, each facing a unique challenge," he says.

All the sleepless nights, crazy brain-storming sessions, selling of ideas thereafter, seemed to pay off when the team hit upon concepts that were regarded truly innovative by the judges who represented global companies like OPEN from American Express, Whirlpool, Lexmark, Harley-Davidson and Shell.

They impressed these global giants with solutions which were simple, effective and easily implementable. Harley Davidson question was the first in line. The students were asked to come up with ideas to integrate the Harley community. And as a solution they came up with the idea called, ‘Making Friends The Harley Way'.

"Keeping in mind the Harley cult, our solution was to come up with an exclusive social net working site and allow customers to design their own web page and have the option to create a bulk SMS link, thereby integrating the community further," says Meghna.

Amex wanted a new feature that can be added to their credit card to improve international transactions by their small business OPEN customers. "This was the tough cookie. Meghna hit upon the basic idea on which we worked really hard. We provided a solution that integrated the forward market with the credit card and created an easy platform for customers to hedge their currency risks. The idea was called ‘Leap Forward' and was received very well," says Sushant.

The last was the Hilton challenge which asked for ways to improve their ‘Green Marketing' by giving a solution that would also be revenue generating. "For this, we came up with ‘Green Ambassadors' - a marketing strategy revolving around a marketing tool like a green credit card with green points available to the customers. We backed it by a pull strategy through lifestyle brochures and a website which will draw customers to you, not push them to buy your product or idea," says Pushkar.

All their ideas were received well and some may also be implemented soon, a prospect which not only gives these young achievers a great high, but is also a super perk on their CVs.