Team of working professionals wins BITS School of Management’s Design Thinking Challenge 2023

NEW DELHI: BITS School of Management (BITSoM) has awarded the Design Thinking Challenge – Mumbai 2023 to ‘Fineapple’, a team of young working professionals from Mumbai. The team was felicitated at the second edition ‘Beacon -- Management Ideas Festival’.

The theme for the Challenge was ‘How can the citizens of Mumbai, from all sections of society, enjoy a better quality of life with opportunities for work and recreation in the next 10 years?’

Fineapple clinched the top prize of Rs 2.5 lakh. The team comprised architect Aishwarya Chodankar, researcher engineer of IIT Bombay Paridhi Subbaian Kaliamoorthy, chartered accountant Daksshin Gopalakrishna and school vice principal Pranjali Bhagwat. They proposed to create a solution for urban agriculture that enables recreation in Mumbai with a modular planter system, which they named Plant Lego. It uses a honeycomb-like structure to maximise space efficiency while accounting for soil aeration, ease of maintenance and user-friendliness.

The second place was taken by ‘Up-Coming’ from NMIMS Balwant Sheth School of Architecture Mumbai. The team of Nandika Shah, Rajvardhan Jain and Gaurav Shah won a cash prize of Rs 1.5 lakh. ‘Dream Team’ and ‘OG Design Thinkers’ from WeSchool were the other two finalists.

Second edition of 'Beacon'

BITSoM said more than 1,700 students in the age group 18 to 30 years participated in the competition. The challenge aimed to foster innovation, identify problems and opportunities, and propose practical and implementable solutions, it added.

In its second edition of Beacon, former coach of Indian Cricket Team Gary Kirsten, Oscar winning filmmaker Guneet Monga Kapoor, classical vocalist and composer Kaushiki Chakraborty, and music director Shantanu Moitra spoke on the topic ‘building high preforming teams’.

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Professor of organisation behaviour at BITSoM Leena Chatterjee said, “Leaders of tomorrow must care about and shape the environment in which they function. In line with this, our Design Thinking Challenge was an opportunity for the youth of Mumbai to apply the design process to ideas that can positively impact Mumbai and its future.”