Tryst with Dr APJ Abdul Kalam

It was my first year of management education at Christ College Institution of Management CCIM). A green color poster is strikingly visible on our college notice board. It has an open invitation to all the B School students to participate in a business plan competion hosted by National Innovation Foundation (NIF), Ahmedabad and Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad. It was a social innovation project, where all the rural innovations are segmented and offered as a real time business plan for students to commercialize the project.
I was curious to explore this opportunity and created a team of 4. Team DRISHTI (Avijith Choudhary, Apeksha Chaplot, Paul William and myself). NIF had given the option of choosing our project. Based on our convience, logistics and feasibility, we opted for "SEPTIC TANK BAFFLE SYSTEM".
Septic tanks are tanks which are used for drainage systems in rural parts of the country, where there is no central drainage system. It is predominantly made of concrete structure and the common system which is followed is a two pit system.
After doing the ground work, we set out to meet the social entreprenuer Mr Rajesh in Trissur. He is social worker in Trissur and has invented this project. After understanding the concept (science behind the system) we put our grey cells to explore possibilities to make it successgul. The interesting aspect of this project was that it was half left out by IIM, Kozikode students. This challenge acted as a catalyst and aptly supported by my faculty and priciple of my college we took up the challenge.
Market research was carried out to understand the market potential of the product and the competitors to this project.
We interlocked with government adminstration to give us latest validated statistics for this project.
Based on our inputs we presented our research to the competion. With the good will and our efforts paid results. We were invited to present our paper at the forum.
Judges were form Mc Kinsey and faculty of IIM, A were judging our paper and presentation. After the presentation we were the top 5 presenters and had an opportunity to interact with our Hon. President APJ Abdul Kalam. Our innovator of the product received royalty for his innovation and the commercialization report was handed over to the industrialists in Kerala to implement the project.
We were the first team in the history of CCIM to present business plan in such forums and win successfully

http://www.sristi.org/cms/Disha%20Business%20Competition.pdf

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