Industry stalwarts discuss the enormous potential of the ’Bottom of the Pyramid’ concept in the Indi
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Ensemble 2005, the annual festival of XLRI, would be held at Jamshedpur on November 12 and 13 in a format that would be different from the general B-school Festival format in the sense that it would have events for students, corporates, and B-school aspirants.
The games and case studies would be taken as usual from real life incidents and problems faced by sponsors of the event, a release issued by XLRI said. Industry stalwarts would discuss the enormous potential of the ’Bottom of the Pyramid’ concept in the Indian business scenario under the ’Idea Summit 2005’ section of Ensemble.
Leading B-schools and top corporates were expected to battle it out for top honours in business games, case studies and paper writing contests across all business functions like marketing, finance, HR, systems and operations. The top 20 business schools would be invited and about 125 outside participants would be at XLRI to take part in the final rounds or to attend seminars along with select foreign B-schools.
The theme ’Inverting the Pyramid’ would focus on building sustainable profitable business models for the mass markets which were neglected so long. Recent trends in Indian markets indicated a distinct shift towards the bottom of the pyramid, said the release.
The theme would be common for the case-analyses, simulations and paper writing contests. Reliance Infocomm, ITC, HLL, Tata Steel, Air Deccan and some others were backing the effort, said the release.
The flagship game, ITC-Pharaohs, would transport participants to another world to face extreme odds while building a pyramid in the sands of ancient Egypt for a total prize money of Rs 1 lakh.
The total prize money for the events was around Rs 5.5 lakh. Five finalist teams in the marketing game would get the opportunity to interact with a creative team from Ogilvy at Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata to crystallize brand strategy and come out with a creatives in print, electronic, web etc.. The Idea Summit would be a panel discussion with focus on perspectives and experiences relevant to the bottom of the pyramid.
Participants would include S Sivakumar, chief executive of the ITC agri–business division in charge of the e-Choupal network, the originator of project Shakti of HLL, and a representative of SEWA, the microinsurance group for women.
