During the last week of March 2017, Dr Bhanu Ranjan, Assistant Professor of Communications at SP Jain, organised a 90-seconds elevator pitch in a car for the Global MBA students at the Singapore Campus. Dr Ranjan had invited four individuals from the industry who had to pitch or assess pitches for their day-to-day work, to join in as assessors for the pitches.
The exercise was conducted across four days, with sixty students who participated. At the end of the day, the students would receive valuable feedbacks from the assessor and a private recording viewing session on how they flared during the exercise.
Figure 1 From left – Dr Bhanu Ranjan, Evangeline Leong, CEO and Founder,
Kobe Global Technologies and Apoorva Shanbhogue (student)
Figure 2 Ketki Sen, Co-founder & Partner at Spinta Global Accelerator and
Tanya Ali (Student)
The Chance to Make Mistakes
The purpose behind this exercise was to provide students the chance to practice on their pitches, be it a potential idea or their personal brand. Dr Ranjan hoped that students, after the exercise, could present better during networking and investor meetup opportunities, or during the business meetings. Not all the time does one have the luxury to have more than two minutes’ face time during a busy networking session. If one is lucky enough to land a meeting, a good pitch may end up to be the most important minute and a half of their career.
The exercise also made the students consider several parameters like - What do you keep? What do you exclude? What do you emphasise?
The evaluators, later, connected with the students on LinkedIn and further helped them by sharing events and simulators where they can continuously practice and network.
“I want the students to have the chance to practice pitching and the chance to make mistakes now rather than later”, said Dr Ranjan.
“This is a great exercise that forces students to pitch in uncomfortable situations. I wished I had someone like Dr Ranjan who is so passionate to help the students during my school days!” - said Evangeline Leong, CEO and Founder, Kobe Global Technologies who was one of the assessors.
Special thanks to the assessors Evangeline Leong, CEO and Founder, Kobe Global Technologies; Ketki Sen, Co-founder & Partner at Spinta Global Accelerator; Varun Tandon, Product Owner of Janison Wynthia Goh, Chief Digital Officer at Aviva