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IIM Indore hosted the HULT Prize @ Campus—The One Million Dollar Start up Challenge on November 21, 2016. The event is the world’s largest student competition for social entrepreneurship. Known as the ‘Nobel Prize for Students’ by media outlets world-wide, the HULT Prize is offered in partnership with former US President Mr. Bill Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative. A challenge topic is announced every year and the winners are announced in the month of September. The issue addressed this year was—Reawakening Human Potential: The Refugee Opportunity.
The winners of the competition receive USD 1 Million in seed capital, as well as mentorship and advice from the international business community. Each of the finalists receives pilot funding along with membership to the Clinton Global Initiative. It is hosted and supported by HULT International Business School, and generously funded by Swedish entrepreneur Bertil Hult.
The first step to the entire process is the selection of campus director, which involved the applicants to go through an interview process. Campus director plays a critical role in the overall HULT Prize experience. Each campus director officially represents the HULT Prize organization. Gaurav Mandan (PGP 2015-17) outshone others in the process and was selected as the campus director. Rigorous campaigns were used to create awareness about the event in and around the campus. The competition comprised of 2 rounds.
The campus round witnessed a lot of applications which were judged by experts from the areas of Organizational Behaviour, International HRM, qualitative inquiries from a post structural frame with informal economy workers, refugees, temporary workers and workers with formal employment contracts. The judges gave the participants valuable feedback on the feasibility and sustainability of their ideas and the role it would play in the longer run in order to solve the said problem.
The winner was the team Avant Garde consisting of Mahendra Mohan Das, Ritika Maheshwari, Krishnendu Babu and Kriyanshi Aggarwal from PGP 2015-17 batch.
The first runners-up position was secured by the team Perfect Plot consisting of Payal Jain, Abhishek Jha, Rahul Sundeep and Jay Megotia of PGP 2015-17 batch.
The second runners-up were team Refuge consisting of Aayush Khurana, Atirek Rajpal, Pallavi Gupta and Utsav Mahto of PGP 2016-18 batch.
Team Avant Garde has bagged the opportunity to represent IIM Indore in National Finals which is scheduled to happen in Delhi in January 2017, which when qualified will give them a chance to the next International Regional Finals round which will take place in Dubai, Boston, London, Shanghai and San Francisco.
About HULT Prize Foundation– The HULT Prize Foundation is a start-up accelerator for budding young social entrepreneurs emerging from the world’s top universities. Named as ‘one of the top five ideas changing the world’ by President Mr. Clinton and TIME Magazine, the annual competition for the HULT Prize aims to identify and launch the most compelling social business ideas: start-up enterprises that tackle grave issues faced by billions of people.