IIM, Bangalore Student Wins 2009 Fall Capstone® Business Simulation Challenge

IIM, Bangalore Student Wins 2009 Fall Capstone® Business Simulation Challenge

Kiran V. Holla of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, has won the 2009 Fall Capstone® Business Simulation Challenge, an international business simulation competition that attracted 522 competitors from university campuses in India, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Chile and the United States.

Kiran first used the Capstone® Business Simulation under Prof. Dharam Pal in the Executive General Management Program at IIM Bangalore. He entered the international competition and in November reached the finals, competing against five other virtual CEOs. Kiran achieved 864 points out of 1000 on the Balanced Score Card to win the competition. Pro. Pal also taught the 4th Place winners in the competition, Anubhav Bansal and Gopal Garg of the Institute of Management Technology in Nagpur.

Kiran hopes to move into the microfinance industry. He said using Capstone® in his university course was “an excellent opportunity for us to apply the principles that we had learnt in theory.”

“For example, we had studied subjects like sales forecasting, inventory management, corporate financing etc and Capstone® gave us a good opportunity to gain further insight into the subjects.

“Most importantly, Capstone® is structured as an oligopolistic market and hence ‘strategic behavior – decisions that take into account possible reactions of others’, play a major role. This was the part we loved best. Each team needs to make intelligent guesses on how rivals would react when it contemplates expanding capacity or cutting prices etc. This is something that is best experienced practically. No amount of theoretical learning can beat this experience!”

Five of the six finalists in the Capstone® Challenge were from non-American universities. Capsim’s coordinator of the challenge, May Zelner, described the particular challenges for finalists from India.

“During qualifying rounds, students make a new set of decisions every day, whereas in their courses they are used to making decisions once a week and having time to scrutinize the results and collaborate with teammates. During the finals it is even more intense with Round 1 on Saturday, then Rounds 2 through 8 on Sunday.

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