Case in point

Updated on: Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Kolkata: Invicta, the IIM C team, made up of Chandrima Das, Gaurab Arka Chaudhuri and Rajyalakshmi K are still coming to terms that they came in third at National Case Study Competition 2009 in Mumbai organised by Directi.

Fifteen b-schools and 1000 students from across the country took part in the competition on December 24. Their task: design a new blog service in a SaaS model for Directi with India as the target market.

“Most corporates have not learnt how to leverage the social media,” feels Gaurab.

All teams had to assume that they were the head of strategy, business development & marketing and come up with a powerpoint presentation to spread awareness on blogging, achieve market awareness and increase revenue.

Chandrima, a second-year PGDM student, felt that the competition was different from any case study that she had taken part in.

”We could not depend on any existing data for this case study. It was open-ended and so much fun,” she says.

The IIM team came up with the idea of support in the Indian language scripting and an aggregator platform, where snippets from different blogs.

The top three had totally different strategies. “Our approach was more technical compared to the first and second prize winners, whose presentations were more market-driven,” reveals Gaurab.

ISB Hyderabad won first prize, the 1st runner-up was FMS, Delhi and 2nd runner-up was IIMC.

The team gained an industry perspective from the experience. “We do have a lot of case studies and theory in our degree, but we learnt what was relevant for industry through the experience,” says Rajyalakshmi.

The best part of the case study for Gaurav, was the industry feedback. “Bhavin Turakhia, founder, chairman and CEO, Directi, told us how to make our ideas more practical,” he says.

The team has received Rs 50,000 as a prize. With friends clamouring for treats, the three are not quite sure how they will spend it.

“We will split the money amongst ourselves. I am still thinking of what to do with my share,” says Chandrima.

Gaurab will take his friends out and then think about what to do with the rest of the money.

Rajyalakshmi, however, will be spending the money on a holiday to Goa.

Case in point

More Education news