Students, Siddarth Karthikeyan, Vignesh Aravamudhan, Krishna Chandra Panda from the 2 nd year were the 1st runner’s up of the prestigious V-Guard BIG IDEA contest. Here are their answers to some common questions that riddle the minds of many business school students regarding corporate competitions.
1. How do you feel V-Guard Big Idea Contest is different and what was your strategy towards choosing the same?
V-Guard Big Idea Contest is a unique competition which requires participants to present a suitable business plan for a prosperous future growth. The idea should also be aligned with their core values and business portfolio. It gives an opportunity to use our engineering & technological skills as well as analytical abilities to propose a B-plan.
2. What was your approach towards the ideation and data collection, which are quite significant in any case study?
We first analyzed the current product portfolio of the company and what it is planning for the future. Their new motto was to ‘Bring home a better tomorrow’, suggesting that they are now concentrating on new innovation in their existing product line. So we tried to approach the business plan through an idea for innovation for their current product – Air Cooler. Data collection was based on certain variables required and the type of output needed.
3. What challenges did you face while collecting data for the study?
To find the relevant data from a reliable source was a major roadblock. For primary research, it was difficult to get insights from industry salespersons and also to specifically target air cooler users to understand their perception about the product.
4. Participating in a national level competition, must have provided you a growth trajectory. As a management student, tell us your key takeaways.
The following would briefly summarize the mammoth of learning us in particular and people in general, get from participating in such competitions:
How to generate different ideas, analyze the potential of each idea and choose the best one.
Presenting the idea in a 360-degree business perspective covering all the management aspects such as
Product development, Market analysis, Operational Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Financial Strategy etc.
Learning about the current market and its real-time functionaries.
5. There must have been some roadblocks that you must have faced designing the final solution? How did you overcome such problems?
Any idea would surely contain its pros and cons. - highlighting the positives while not overlooking the negatives was a challenge. Shaping the deliverables to its final form which were a full-length report in the initial round and a presentation in the final round was a bigger challenge.
6. To sum up, how would you define your journey in the V-Guard Big Idea Contest?
It was a wonderful experience which we would cherish forever, as we not only got an opportunity to present our idea but also were able to see the presentations of students from other leading B-schools across India. We also had a chance to interact with the top level executives of V-Guard who were very much impressed by our ideas and gave valuable feedback. The feedback we got has helped us greatly in thinking about how we should go about developing a holistic strategy for a new product in terms of feasibility, financial operations, and marketing.