IIT Kanpur MBA Blog

Pragyan- the guest lecture series of the IME Department, IIT Kanpur, organised under the umbrella of Prabandhan’16, witnessed an array of informative seminars delivered by some of the greatest personalities from all over India. One of the guest lectures on ‘Analytics in today’s world’ was delivered by Ms. Sridevi Vadapalli, an M.Sc in Statistics from the University of Hyderabad and having around 15 years of experience in analytics across industries like BFSI, Retail / CPG and manufacturing. Her experience includes indulgence in industries like Text mining, Market basket analysis, Cross sell, Upsell, Churn model, Web analytics etc. She presently heads customer and marketing analytics and operational analytics for FSI clients. Ms. Sridevi commenced the lecture by explaining the importance of historical data via a real life example. Our present-day decisions become biased based on the already existing data with us. All in all, analytics is about analyzing the historical data, find...

Mr. Anshul Garg, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur (MBA batch of 2005-07), currently the Director and V.P. at Centrum Capital Ltd, delivered a seminar on Banking and Finance as a part of ‘Pragyan’ during 'Prabandhan - 2016' . The following are the excerpts from this interactive session. The discussion spanned across banking scenario in India, technology in banking and future scope in finance. As told by him, the motivation behind a career in banking is the fact that presently out of $5600 billion wealth in India; only $250 billion is actually in investment which he told implied a huge scope for wealth management and investment. However, building up mathematical and quantitative skills remains vital to work in this area. He further threw some light on the tasks of wealth managers. One of the key tasks included assessing the product mix of companies and striking an ideal balance. He also explained some of the risks involved in working in the niche banking roles by providing the...

Prabandhan 2016 organized Pragyan, the guest lecture series of IME Department, IIT Kanpur. The series was kick-started by Mr. Sheraz Saeed, Founder of Websters. Websters is a Dubai based social media company started in 2011 and specialized in web designing and digital marketing. It is a part of SoftAge Information Technology Ltd. Mr. Saeed gave a seminar on “Start ups and Digital Marketing”. Giving a brief overview about himself Mr. Saeed mentioned how during his final year at BITS Pilani, Dubai campus he saw a requirement for web services in the Dubai market and from initially beginning as a freelancer he founded Websters, which offers a range of dedicated social media services along with other digital assistance in web development, app development, social media management, analytics, digital marketing etc. Mr Saeed engaged the audience by probing about some start-up ideas. To the passionate budding entrepreneurs who had such ideas and the audience in general, he gave an ...

The second day of Prabandhan witnessed a seminar by Mr. Sourav Shah (Head Digital Marketing and CRM,  Jubilant Foodworks) as part of the guest lecture series Pragyan. The prime emphasis was upon Digital Marketing- A key perspective and future. The seminar began with some interesting and insightful discussion on the Digital adoption rate vis a vis the traditional media like TV, print media, telephone etc and it was concluded that digital media had seen a far greater adoption rate than any other. Sir strongly emphasized that going digital was the way to go for present and future marketers and it would be the most crucial medium and competition platform for business. Being innovative and proactive in the digital space would be quintessential for competitive advantage very soon if not already. Sir bolstered this argument with several examples such as Whats-app, Facebook, smartphones etc each of which had offered unique value propositions and were being adopted at...

‘Prabandhan – 2016’ presents ‘Pragyan’, the guest lecture series of IME department, IIT Kanpur. The second seminar of the series by Mr Manish Agarwal, Senior Vice President – Digital marketing & Innovation, Kotak Mahindra Bank, focused on “Digital Marketing and Disruption in Finance”. In an enlightening seminar, he talked about the changing trend in marketing from traditional to the digital marketing where technology plays the pivotal role. He enlisted three critical dimensions which are driving this paradigm shift, namely: Hyper Adoption, Digital Disruption and Customer Experience. These three dimensions are changing the entire marketing arena which has now become an end to end process. To drive the point home, sir gave the example of Tesla motors, which launched a new model in April 2016 and within 36 hours they received about 400 thousand bookings even before its industrial production had begun. This indicated the power of digital marketing. He purported that the digita...