SPJIMR, Mumbai Wins Cognizant's Board Room: Smart Business Plan Contest, 2009

SPJIMR, Mumbai Wins Cognizant's Board Room: Smart Business Plan Contest, 2009

Winning Team of S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai Receiving the cash prize

Aimed at promoting a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation among the management students across B-schools in India and the Asia Pacific region, Cognizant had launched the Boardroom: Smart Business Plan Contest in 2007. This was the third edition of the contest.

Neeraj Jain, Parag Mehra and Palaniappan N. from S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai, won the finals of Board Room 2009, a Smart Business Plan contest organized by IT, consulting and BPO major Cognizant for B-Schools across the Asia Pacific region. The runners up were Ankit Agarwal, Mandar Kulkarni and Jasmeet Bhatia from Xavier Labor Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur. The winning team from SPJIMR received a cash prize of Rs. 250,000, while the runners-up received Rs. 150,000.

The finals of the Board Room 2009 contest were held on November 20, 2009, at Cognizant's Thoraipakkam techno-complex in Chennai. The other finalists included Indian Institute of Management, Indore (IIMI), Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), and Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT), Delhi.

The contest, held in three phases spanning two months, provided a unique 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.

For the preliminary rounds this year, Cognizant received about 150 entries from students of B-Schools across India and the Asia Pacific region. Of these, 125 entries were found eligible and 12 were shortlisted for the semifinals. Cognizant's senior management members and domain experts with substantial experience "mentored" the shortlisted teams for about two weeks on various aspects of their business plan and global business issues, and introduced them to the dynamics of the corporate world-a unique feature of 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 R. Chandrasekaran, President and Managing Director, Global Delivery, Cognizant, who himself is an alumnus of IIM, Bangalore. "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 of an important stakeholder-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."

Concluded.

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