Pune student is ET Prodigy 2009

NEW DELHI: It isn’t everyday that a young man still in a B-school gets to rub shoulders with captains of India Inc at the ET Awards for Corporate Excellence and that too when he isn’t a heir to any business empire.

Nishant Prabhu, a second year B-school student at Symbiosis, Pune, while still learning the nuances of management, cracked a case study, edging out not just students but also corporate executives, to win the title of ET Prodigy for 2009 plus a gleaming Skoda Laura.

The other winners included Swathi Jain and Ankita Jain (first and second positions, respectively, among ‘students’), Nivesh Seth and Praveen Poojari (first and second, respectively, among ‘working professionals’); as well as Rohan Desai and Karthick (first and second, respectively, in the ‘ET in Campus community’.

The ET Prodigy initiative, launched in September last year, received as many as 1,500 entries. These entries were vetted by a jury comprising senior editors of The Economic Times and experts from Knowledge Partner, KPMG. The judging process for ET Prodigy was in three stages with the first stage being aimed at eliminating entries that were either incomplete or unstructured. For the nearly 800 entries that made it to the second stage, scrutiny became tighter with parameters such as sustainability, scalability, clarification of unique value proposition, definition of the target market, etc being applied to them.

The last stage, which had just 26 of the most promising entries, was the toughest one for the jury with weighted averages being applied to make the final list of winners.