IIM Lucknow is proud to announce the successful completion of Hult Prize campus round. The world's largest student competition on social entrepreneurship, the Hult Prize@Campus edition is getting organised at top fifty educational institutions in India, IIM Lucknow NOIDA campus being one of them.
The Hult Prize Foundation is a start-up accelerator for budding young social entrepreneurs emerging from the world’s universities. Named as one of the top five ideas, changing the world by President Bill Clinton and TIME Magazine, the annual competition for the Hult Prize aims to create and launch the most compelling social business ideas—start-up enterprises that tackle grave issues faced by billions of people. Winners receive USD1 Million in seed capital, as well as mentorship and advice from the international business community.
The event differentiated itself from the beginning. There was a gruelling interview for the recruitment of the campus director. Gourav Roy from the pioneering batch of PGPSM got selected as the campus director. He buckled up for the event by appointing his core team consisting of Monica Singh, Prabhat Kumar, Bharat Wadhwa, Pranay Chafle and Anup Dangaich. Thanks to the efforts of the core team.
In excess of 36 teams participated in the event from across 10 batches of different programmes running in IIM Lucknow. The teams were diverse ranging from just-graduated freshers to highly-experienced working managers. The campus round kicked off with an Info-session held on 12th November where last year's Regional Finalist team helped clear doubts of those who were interested. With this being the first ever occasion that edition of an international event was getting organised, we received from support and guidance from the administration.
The core team left no stone unturned to create a buzz about the event, gain sponsorship from the corporate and choose the most-suited judges for the event. The panel was wisely chosen by the organising team to have different perspectives. Mr. Kumar Vivek, Education Specialist at the World Bank Group brought with him the expertise in dealing such social problems. Mr. Anadi Saran Pande ,Professor in strategy area of IIM Lucknow gave valuable insights on how to test the feasibility of the ideas and ways to go about improving it. Last but not the least, Mr.Prateek Gupta, an ex-army officer and Chief Program Officer at the Clinton Health Access Initiative gave the participants his ideas on the feasibility of the business plans and the potential problems in the financial success of the plan and the implementation.
On the D-day i.e., Nov 26th, the event started off with the motivation of Prof.M Akbar, head of Incubator Cell, IIM Lucknow. Besides the teams presenting in person, there were over ten teams who presented their ideas over video conferencing from the Lucknow campus. After all the presentations and intense rounds of Q&A, the judges announced the team "Renascence" as the campus winners to represent IIM Lucknow at a national level.
The IIM Lucknow fraternity wishes them all the very best for the further rounds and put faith that IIM Lucknow’s team would reach the finals at Boston and receive the 1 million USD to set up their venture and help the world solve one of the biggest problems today.