SPJIMR PGDM participants: Anamika Sinha, Pragya Tripathi, Lakshmi Krishnan, Divya Mody and Sreenath Pillai were announced runners up in the 2019 best MOC student project. The award was presented at HBS by Prof. Michael Porter, at a dinner reception on the 10th December 2019 at Harvard Business School.
It was attended by more than 150 professors from all over the world, who are part of the Microeconomics of Competitiveness (MOC) network. Organized under the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness at HBS, the MOC Affiliate Network is a group of more than 100 educational institutions around the world that teach the MOC curriculum and collaborate in the area of competitiveness. The MOC student project submitted by SPJIMR was titled, “Ankleshwar Chemical Cluster,” and was chosen as the runner up for best 2019 MOC student project.
Certificates were given to all the student authors and the paper will be made available to affiliates through the MOC network web pages. The intent of the student work is aimed at using the MoC toolkit from their course to undertake a depth analysis of a cluster of their choice. This year, universities across the world worked on a range of industrial clusters that included green tech in Austria, a music festival in Serbia, block chain in Switzerland, water management in Netherlands and the cannabis cluster in Alberta. Enhanced competitiveness is linked to increase in prosperity and social progress.
The team chose Ankaleshwar because it was a relatively recent success story. Despite local and international competition, this cluster is performing well, with high employment
and per capita income. However, the student analysis and cluster map revealed some key opportunities for improvement in R&D, worker safety and efficiency, and ways to reduce pollution.