Creative Thinking And Unique Ideas Fetched These Teams Cash Prize Worth Lakhs Via Philips Code to Care and ThinkUp Challenge 2021

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As ideas become the new currency of the world, Philips- a household name in India, is aiming to generate unique solutions to different problems by leveraging creativity of the young minds. Last year, two of the challenges organized by Philips-Code to Care Challenge and Philips-ThinkUp Challenge 2021 got great response from students. 

In a nutshell

Let's give you a brief review of the two challenges. 

Philips Code to Care Challenge 2021 was open to students pursuing B.Tech/B.E./M.Tech/Dual degree programs across engineering colleges in India. As the name suggests, 'Code to Care' nudged budding coders to build prototypes of ideas that ensure better health outcomes, improve patient experience and enhance healthcare satisfaction using AI and smart devices.

Philips ThinkUp Challenge 2021, was a unique opportunity for MBA students to encourage them to come up with creative solutions to problems. Using the knowledge gained at the B schools, they had to work on a live business problem and push their imagination to find out-of-the-box solutions.  

The Winner teams won cash prize worth INR 1,00,000. The top performers from the National Finalist teams won PPI opportunity from Philips.

We spoke to the National Winner teams of these challenges to know their journey through these competitions. Here is what they had to say.

The Preparation: "Concentrated on deep understanding of the problem”

Both the challenges had different stages that kept the participants on their toes. These were the preliminary round , idea submission round, mentorship phase, grand-finale PPT submissions and lastly the final round- the Grand Finale.

IIM Bangalore team-Team TechRapidos swooped through these rigorous stages before making it in the finalists of the ThinkUp Challenge. The team included Madhusudhan Kosinepalli, Sushma Siddamsetty and Ajith Chandra Gopu. Since the competition was tough, a clear strategy was the only way ahead. When asked about their preparation, Madhusudhan from the team said,

“Understanding the case took a lot of time and pinning down which models to use for better forecasting was the most challenging phase.” 

Team TechRapidos's persistence and expertise helped them decode the best solution making them the national winners of the challenge. 

Speaking of the Code to Care Challenge, it demanded both coding prowess and imagination to go hand-in-hand. Hence, Team Binary Beasts which included Shreya M Biradar, Utkarsh Agrawal and Tarun Datwani from MSRIT Bangalore, began their preparation with researching and diving deep into the problem statement given to them. It took the team almost a month to evolve and complete their solution. When asked to comment on their preparation strategy, Shreya from the team said,

“We are engineering students and had to find a solution in healthcare. Hence the most challenging part of this competition for us was to understand the working of x-ray machines, their medical significance, the existing problems and then propose our solution for the same. It took us a while but we finally worked it out.”

Their 3 members team not only won the national title but also the 'Mind-Boggling Idea' title of the season!

Team's forte: "Building on each other's capabilities"

Any team event demands perfect team coordination amongst team members. For Team Binary Beasts and Team Tech Rapidos, diverse ideas and expertise was the main strength. 

Shreya from Team Binary Beasts said,

“Diversity and integrity were our team's forte. We were 3 members. Utkarsh Agrawal was the 'tech genius' of our team. Tarun Datwani was the all rounder with great pitching skills and made sure that things were done as planned. And my focus was on brainstorming ideas backed by proper research. I was also the front-end designer of our team. We did face conflicts during the process but our in-depth discussions helped us resolve them. I feel the proper blend of these strengths made us stand out and become the National winners.”

Team Tech Rapidos from IIM Bangalore too had members with different expertise. When asked what made their team perform well, Madhusudhan said,

“I think building on each other's capabilities was our team's forte. We complemented each other. So while Sushma was good at analytics and modeling, Ajith was good at data crunching and I helped them with business insights and context setting.”

Learnings of the Winners

The Challenges were excellent learning experiences for both the teams. They pushed their imagination and brought out their best performances. And the final result was nothing but pure happiness. Remembering his experience at the competition, Madhusudhan said,

“One thing I learnt through the competition was the importance of story-telling during a presentation. Other competitors too were great sources of inspiration. There were 6 teams in the finale. But I considered team IIFT as the toughest one as they delved deep into analytical models and techniques. Overall it was a great learning experience and the final result so satisfying for all of us.” 

For Shreya from Team Binary Beasts, self belief was something very important throughout the competition, especially when the other teams were tough players. As per her, the toughest competitor was Team TechXtract from VIT Vellore as they utilized AR/VR based 3-D models for better visualization.The grit and hard work of Team Binary Beasts made them sail through all the rounds and finally make it to the top.

Finally, we asked Shreya about the winning moment and she exclaimed the entire feeling in four words, “Top of the world!”

Congratulations and more power to all these creative thinkers!