A team of five alumni from the Indian School of Business (ISB) has been awarded the Hult Prize 2014, receiving US$1m in funding from the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) for their groundbreaking start-up initiative to improve access to cost-effective healthcare in India’s urban slums.
Sponsored by Hult International Business School, the Hult Prize is the largest student business plan competition in the world and supports business startups which serve a social purpose.
The objective for this year’s competition was ‘Solving Non-Communicable Diseases in the Urban Slums’
The objective for this year’s competition was ‘Solving Non-Communicable Diseases in the Urban Slums’, and required each team to present a solution that would impact at least 25 million people in urban and semi urban areas.
The winning initiative from NanoHealth consisted of five students on healthcare courses – Aditi Vaish, Ashish Bondia, Manish Ranjan, Pranav Kumar Maranganty, and Ramanathan Lakshmanan – and tackles the problem of late diagnosis and poor prescription compliance among people with diseases including diabetes and hypertension in India’s slums.
It includes training and employing health professionals to bridge the gap between slum-dwelling communities and the local health service equipped with an innovative ‘Doc-in-a-Box’ device developed by the team that will measure disease indicators such as blood sugar and blood pressure.
Opening the award ceremony at the CGI, Ahmad Ashkar, CEO and Founder of the Hult Prize Foundation said: “We created the Hult Prize with one simple mission: how do we make creation of startups which have a business purpose and a social purpose the hottest thing among young entrepreneurs in the world?”
The award was presented by former US President Bill Clinton, who sets the annual social enterprise challenge and congratulated the Hult Prize Foundation on helping to encourage the development of social enterprises.
“If you want to truly assess the condition of the world, you have to take the headlines seriously but you must also look at the trend lines,” he told attendees. “The trend lines are here: with the finalists in this competition and with the idea of creative cooperation.”
“It’s a proud moment for all of us at ISB, as our alumni team was the first ever entrant from India into the global finals,” ISB’s Dean, Ajit Rangnekar, commented. “This is a culmination of the efforts of the students, supported by the faculty, the Max Institute of Healthcare Management at the ISB, and everybody associated with the team.”
