Innovation by Design Thinking
Our first event of the year 2021-22 was a pre-recruitment event consisting of a guest speaker session and a problem-solving competition involving principles of design thinking.​ The interactive session was conducted by Mr. Chandra Maloo, alumni from the Computer Science batch of ’17. He is currently working as a Product Manager at CRED and has also worked with Samsung Electronics, South Korea, as a Technical Project Manager.
The competition that followed required students in teams of a maximum of three to apply the concepts and learn real-life problem-solving.
Design Thinking encouraged the participants to focus on the user, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes. It was used to solve any and all kinds of problems!
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The problems statements as follows were diverse, interesting, and based on current issues.
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India ranks 173 out of 181 countries globally in female labor force participation. Some experts opine that this is one of the biggest levers to thrust India’s GDP per capita significantly forward. However, the challenges towards fixing this outcome aren’t simple. How would you go about understanding and solving for them? Try to devise a solution in the form of a service or product that would help curb this issue.
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Solve the problem for the neglected rural population of India. According to KPMG, 75% of India’s doctors focus on 30% of the population, the one that resides in urban India. That’s just about 442 million people. That still leaves a population of close to a billion people, taken care of by the rest 25% of doctors. The rural population of India also suffers from access to public hospitals, affordable diagnostics, medicines, and a lack of insurance. What do you think can be done about this? Ideate a system or service that could help solve this issue.
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Schools and colleges are places where teenagers spend most of their time. But there has been a culture of bullying that has been observed in schools and to some extent colleges that affects a student’s mental well-being. How do you think you can solve this problem with a human-centric approach to provide a service or plan to the School to prevent bullying (assume pre-Covid world)?
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Covid-19 has forced a paradigm shift in teaching institutions across the world. Technology and infrastructure are trying to replicate offline teaching models in the online world. However, a fundamental challenge of social connections and bonding remains to be overcome. How would you go about addressing this aspect?
We were glad to see a tremendous amount of enthusiasm from all the participants. All the entries submitted were stellar and of excellent quality, and judging them was a challenging task for our guest speaker Chandra Maloo.
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The top 3 winners of the competition received cash prizes worth INR 6K and got bonus points for the Junior Consultant recruitment of ShARE’s Global Leadership Programme 2021!
