Jindal School Students Serve as Industry Consultants in Case Competition

by Madison Franquiz - December 7th, 2022 - Academics, Students

During the fall 2022 semester, students from the Naveen Jindal School of Management participated in the Nokia Challenge, an extracurricular case competition with $7,000 in prize money.

Thirty-two teams totaling 150 students were tasked with researching approaches to Nokia’s entry into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) as an accelerator of 5G-enabled solutions and offering proposals of their findings to the company’s senior leadership.

The competition was directed by Dr. Ron Bose, director of the Center for Information Technology and Management (CITM) at the Naveen Jindal School of Management with strong support from two student organizations — 180 Degree Consulting (undergraduate consulting club) and Consulting Leadership and Development Society (graduate consulting club).

“My role is to provide exceptional opportunities for my students to better understand the interlocking of business and academics,” he said. “One of my responsibilities is industry outreach.”

Bose found an opportunity for his students with Mark Bunn, the senior vice-president of Nokia Cloud and Network Services’, SaaS Business Operations, who also serves on the Advisory Board of CITM.

“Mark and I have been good friends for more than 20 years now,” Bose said. “We were at lunch one day over the summer, and he asked, ‘Can I sponsor a competition?’ I said ‘let’s put an idea together.’ Thus, the Nokia Challenge was born.”

Sixteen teams presented their ideas to a panel of faculty judges by supplying a link to a 20-minute preliminary presentation. Faculty members pared the field down to the final five teams, which were then judged by a panel of five Nokia executives. The finalist teams were assigned mentors from Jindal School faculty, to help them prepare for the final presentations to Nokia, as well as offered office hours with Nokia subject matter experts.

“This competition was unique in the sense that students were provided with a business problem to solve without being provided with any specific data,” Bunn said. “The world of 5G is continuing to grow. Right now, it is the biggest thing that is going on in technology. This is a problem that I am currently facing in my role at Nokia. [We wanted to] see what they [could] do with it.”

Students spent several weeks working on this problem, researching, holding team meetings, and preparing to address a challenge as they might do in the real world. On Nov. 17, the judges from Nokia selected the winning team. Contestants were evaluated on quality, confidence, creativity, and teamwork.

Namrata Kukreja, an MBA-MS Information Technology and Management student; Ji Li, an Economics PhD student; Saheba Priyadarshni, an MS Marketing student; and Sandhya Sunder, an MS in Finance student; were on the winning team. They each received $750. The rest of the prize money was distributed among the other finalists.

Kukreja said the competition was the perfect opportunity for her to apply her technical knowledge; gain insights on technology consulting and business strategy and hone her public speaking skills.

“I had a wonderful experience working with a diverse team and presenting to Nokia leadership,” she said. “As the team lead, I encouraged my teammates to focus on their strengths in fields including technology, business, market research, strategy and finance. Bringing together our varied core competencies was instrumental in our success. Our key to winning was consistency and forming an effective team dynamic to create an organic flow during our presentation. We aspired to win from day one and hoped to be among the top three closer to the competition day. When it came down to announcing the winning team, we were hopeful, but cognizant of our strong competitors. After our team number was called out, we were on cloud nine!” “Mark Bunn asked for the resumes of all 25 of the students who were in the finals,” Bose said. “The winning team was invited to present to Nokia leadership on November 29, 2022.

 “I have seen it repeatedly where we are in the middle of an advisory board meeting, and industry leaders have been so impressed with our students that they get a job offer right in front of me,” Bose said. “I am happy to help students launch their careers through my industry contacts.”