IIM B’s One Year MBA Team Beats 4600 to Win Global Marketing Competition

Remember the movie 300? Well the management edition of the battle just went down in Spain and 3 valiant, though not so ripped, MBA candidates from IIM B have returned home as victors after vanquishing 4600 others students. Their prize? 6000 Euros and dollops of pride! 

A three-member team of students of the One Year Full Time MBA (EPGP) of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore has won the 19th edition of the Global Marketing Competition, an international contest organised by the ESIC Business and Marketing School at Madrid.

The team consisting of Kaustubh Sathe, Praveen Mokkapati and Ravi Kiran Cheni, students of the one year full-time residential MBA (Executive Post Graduate Programme – EPGP), has won themselves a Specialised Master from ESIC and prize money of 6,000 Euros.

More than 4600 students, representing 800 universities from 80 countries, participated in the competition that tested participants on their knowledge and skills in a simulated environment over a 3-month period. Out of the 1,500 teams that initially participated, 36 teams qualified for the semi-finals out of which 6 teams made the finals.

We had reported on the team’s progress in August 2014 when they reached the finals of the competition. Read about it here.

The finals were held in Madrid on November 18 and the finalists had to defend their business plans in front of a jury comprising professionals. Participants donned the roles of Managing Directors of an Automobile brand that had to be created and managed from the start. 

The team from IIM B overcame teams from Novosibirsk State Technical University (Russia), Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain), Peruvian University of Applied Sciences (Peru), Major National University of San Marcos (Peru), Catholic University of Guayaquil (Ecuador) and Goa Institute of Management (India).  

“It was a tough competition that tested our skills in a professional environment. The win means a lot to all of us. Overall we had a great learning experience,” said Kaustubh.

The IIM B Team 

Ravi Kiran Cheni worked for 9 years in the field of automotive New Product Design, Project Management and Global Sourcing at Maruti Suzuki. He was instrumental in Engineering and process capability development of dispersed Indian and overseas suppliers operating in Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea. A recipient of numerous national and international felicitations, Ravi holds a Mechanical engineering degree from Osmania University and has an avid interest in writing, sketching and Japanese culture. He holds 9 technical Research publications presented at international forums and 3 patents filed in automotive design and safety.

Praveen Mokkapati has 7 years of hands-on entrepreneurial experience in developing and executing strategies for business development and marketing in the engineering analysis technology space. He setup the Indian operations of CADFEM, a leading engineering company headquartered in Munich. For a very specialized industry that grows at 15% CAGR, he helped the company grow at 40% CAGR. Praveen holds a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, USA. During leisure, he contributes extensively to the English Wikipedia by writing about underrepresented Indian articles.

Kaustubh Sathe has worked in the Automotive and Aerospace industry for the past 6 years with institutions like IIT Bombay and industry leaders like Cummins, Bosch and Maruti Suzuki. He was instrumental in augmenting the capability of his previous organization (Maruti Suzuki) in the field of automated testing by setting up a test lab for hardware-in-loop simulation and validation of Engine Control Units. Kaustubh holds a Master’s Degree in the field of Digital Signal Processing from The State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA. He has represented his university at the 2007 NCTTA Table Tennis Tournament held in New York.