Smitha Gopinath, Tejas Shah, Ashish Bijawat and Dr. Venkata Chamala Anil, from EGMP batch 39, advance to the Hult Prize Regional Final Round to be held in San Francisco in March
09 February 2017, Bengaluru: One of the winning teams of the Hult Prize 2017 India National Round is from IIM Bangalore, according to the recently announced Top 10 winning teams of the competition across India. The IIMB team has advanced to the Hult Prize Regional Final Rounds to be held in March 2017, which will be hosted at Hult International Business School’s campus in San Francisco.
The winning team members from IIM Bangalore include Smitha Gopinath (Sr. Engineering Manager, Target Corporation), Tejas Shah (Director and President, Kanti Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd.), Ashish Bijawat (Principal Architect, Dell Corporation) and Dr. Venkata Chamala Anil (Consultant Diabetologist) from the Executive General Management Programme (EGMP) 39th batch. The team members, expressing their appreciation for the programme directors Prof. P C Narayan and Prof. Rajluxmi V Murthy, said they were confident that the skills imbibed at IIMB would help them progress to the global finals.
The HULT Prize National Finals was held in Gurgaon on January 15, 2017 and received an overwhelming response from students from different colleges and universities across the nation. A total of 60 teams participated, out of which 10 teams have made it to the regional finals.
The aspiration of the winning team is to create a sustainable and scalable social enterprise that aims to address the fundamental issue of livelihood for 1 billion migrants and homeless globally.
Nagaraja Prakasam, mentor-in-residence at NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL), the entrepreneurship and incubation centre at IIMB, and Angel Investor & Founder, Indian Angel Network, said: “We would like to mentor the winning team at NSRCEL and help them prepare for the subsequent rounds of the HULT Prize 2017 Challenge.”
Manish Kumar, PGP2 student at IIMB and Campus Director, HULT Prize Organization, is confident of his fellow schoolmates’ chance to go all the way and win this year’s Hult Prize. “This is an opportunity to use our skills to create an impact. The kind of impact that will affect the life of millions of people.”
Ahmad Ashkar, CEO and Founder of the Hult Prize, attributes the success of the competition to the global youth revolution. “We continue to be moved by the large number of students from around the world who are capitalizing on the opportunity to develop business models that target the bottom of the pyramid. We wish every team the best of luck and thank IIM Bangalore for supporting this initiative.”
Following the regional finals, one winning team from each host city will move into a summer business accelerator program at HULT business School, where participants will receive mentorship, advisory and strategic planning as they create prototypes and set-up to launch their new social business. The final round of the competition will be hosted at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, where one team will be selected as the Hult Prize recipient.
The Hult Prize is a crowdsourcing platform for social good, named one of the top five ideas changing the world. In partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, the innovative crowdsourcing platform identifies and launches disruptive and catalytic social ventures that aim to solve the planet’s most pressing challenges. This year, the Hult Prize is focused around finding solutions for building sustainable, scalable, social enterprises that restore the rights and dignity of 10 million refugees by 2022.
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