Team Chinja Consulting

Written by Nitchakarn Poolkaew, BBA#27

I had a chance to participate in the creative shock 2019 as one of the finalist teams. This competition is held by the students of ISM business and economic university at Vilnius, Lithuania for 4 days. We joined the opening ceremony at the university, then we took part in the social kick-off session and the workshop about local social business run in Vilnius. In this session, our team has been separated and spattered into different group to crack the short cases they gave us within merely half an hour. My group composed of around 7-10 participants from different nations in which we had to solve for the taxi business that hires the disabled people as their employees. The problem is that the firm lacked of financial support and the CEOs decided to wait for the government support it would be time-consuming and they had a plan to expand the amount of taxi and vacant position to hire more employees and to generate more revenue that will help the firm remained the stability in the market position. We came up with a model to make a lease contract with taxi cars and a plan to penetrate our business through the university community in which it will be our main voice to spread the news and to recruit the disabled citizen. Moreover, we would tap into the internet platform which will ease the difficulty to access the firm information. What I learned from this session is that running a social business requires lots of factors to make enough return; also, the product must be high quality as it should and it cannot claim using the disabled as the company employees to overprice the product. The first-round competition came early. We had only 4 hours before pitching to create our own social business that needed to be feasible, impactful, and creative. So, we chose to establish the social business based on the problems that we are familiar with, the unemployment of those blind people in Thailand. We have concerned the problem of them being underrated and being excluded from the society. Also, the fact that they are treated unequally and the dramatic bias towards them drive us to the final idea of opening a massage store operated by the blind people in that land, for we have done the research and found that even if they are blind but they have an excellent sensory-motor function which will be the competitive advantage of our business. Our targeted customers are the foreigners and the social-concerned people. Operated with the training session, our store can guarantee the quality of product so that the customers would be offered the best services. The selected top 5 teams were announced in the late evening after culture event; fortunately, our team was selected to join the final round. It was undeniably surprised and amazed, to me, for we were competing with the MBA teams and some of them own the businesses and have more experiences than us.

Nemi tea is the case to be cracked in this final round. It is an England-based social business that hires the refugees to be their employees. The concerns are about the limited job and position that they can offer to the refugees. Plus, another concern is the lack of long-term contract in the aspect of business to business. They plan to establish a café in England but the business model is still not evident. So, we had a job to expand the position and revenue to make the company earn enough return to hire a greater number of refugees. Our final solution is to tap into a plausible new product line, eye mask. This product is made of the recyclable materials and what?s inside is the Nemi tea that will help pacify some illness for example eye-aches. Expanding the product lines would leverage the financial benefit of the firm and would also generate more jobs towards the refugees. The award was announced after lunch and it turned out that we got the second place. Once again, my colleagues and I felt super fluttered for it was such an impressive experience and now we have accomplished far more than we thought. We asked for a comment after finishing the presentation so that we can use it to improve our skills. To launch a new product needs more than a promotion said the jury. We needed to be more practical and the business required more comprehensive business model that had a lot of deep analysis of pricing structure, risk management, market position, and the partner company to lessen the investment risk of a new project.

Also, I have learned a lot from participating in this memorable event. I have learned how to work under the pressure for it offered the limited amount of time to crack the case, and I have learned how to work as a team. Cheering each other up is considered as crucial part in my perspective since we worked overnight and felt extra-exhausted; I would say nice words encourage our team to work more energetically and more efficiently. More importantly, I have practiced speaking skill, pitching skill, and socializing skill though this 4-day experience. Socialization is necessary for we had participated in the networking session. I?m also amazed by the kindness of our mentor and the other participants for there was no judgement, no bias, and language barrier did not matter in this case. They treated us as friends and welcomed us with warm words and action in which I would recognize it for eternity.

Posted on February 27, 2020