Daybreak - The disruption playbook is now open source

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Traditional case competitions are boring theater—companies toss out fake problems, students present cookie-cutter solutions nobody uses. The Ken flipped the script. It revealed something interesting: no company is safe anymore. Students attacked more than a 100 incumbents—from McKinsey to temple economies—and built working prototypes showing exactly how they'd do it. The insight? AI hasn't just lowered the cost of building to near-zero; it's fundamentally changed who can be a disruptor. Even established companies know this. Some volunteered as targets, desperate to understand how the next generation thinks. When anyone can build anything, disruption isn't a question of if—it's already happening.Check out the solutions here: https://the-ken.com/case-competition-2025/submissions/Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too. It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the same. secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they managed to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into.

to the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert, as soon as we release our first episode, please follow Intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast. or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode.

In 1997, Howard Professor Clayton Christensen published The Innovator's Dilemma. In it, he introduced a theory that changed how we use two very specific words in business today. Their words we all know and use quite liberally. Disruption and innovation. See, Christens is big idea. idea was the disruptive innovation theory.

Here's what he said. Industry giants could be doing everything right. They could be listening to their best customers, investing in research, improving their products continuously. But many of them will still lose their edge. Eventually, they will get overtaken by younger, faster newcomers. Sounds like a nightmare for big companies, right? And now, with AI in the picture, the question isn't if disruption will come.

It's where it will come from. Companies are now more vulnerable than ever. Small, quick startups now have access to something that levels the playing field. AI gives them access to resources that used to require way more capital and manpower. Observing this change sparked something here at the ken. This year, we wanted to see what this disruption could actually look like. And so we introduced India's first case-build competition. Quick context.

Case study competitions have been around forever. It's when companies put business challenges in front of students, who then compete to develop innovative solutions. Winners typically get job offers or cash prices. But here's the thing. It's less about the problem or the solutions themselves and more about engaging with campus talent. So imagine what happens when the goal is not to work with companies.

What if the goal was to innovate using AI in ways specifically meant to disrupt them? And what happens when companies want to actually work with these students to see how they're thinking about these problems? That's exactly what happened during our competition. And then here comes the build twist. They can ask students to go a step further from just ideating and strategizing. We ask them to actually build a prototype and really show us. why incumbents should be worried.

Last week, 10 teams presented to a panel of four very impressive judges. Nipun Kalra, head of BCGX India, Sahil Barua, the co-founder and CEO of Delivery, Saumya Rajan, founder and CEO of Waterfield Advisors, and Professor Varun Nagraj, the dean of SPJIMR. And sitting with me here in the studio today is Praveen Gopal-Khrushnan, on whom we call PGK at the office. the CPO at the Ken and the main mind behind the competition.

In this conversation, we discuss how this competition showed us how something has fundamentally shifted in the way innovation and disruption work in the age of AI. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Vergeese, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nikha Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 22nd of December.

So thank you so much, PGK, for joining us today. So we wanted to talk to you about the case competition that happened this year and, you know, you wrapped up last week. And I wanted to quickly say that I was, of course, in attendance for the finale. And it was quite an interesting experience and also kind of intense because there were like 10 teams presenting under three hours, I think. And this was after we got more than a thousand applications. So my first question to you is, can you tell us what the purpose behind the case competition is?

Okay, thanks, Rachel. Yeah, a very common question I generally get asked is the Ken does business journalism, why are you doing case competitions? Typically, what happens with case competitions is they're really very boring, honestly. Yeah, not boring necessarily as a participant, but what ends up happening is that companies come and they just give a problem statement. So students think that the solutions that they're coming up with are stuff that the companies will use inside their organizations. And honestly, that almost never happens. In fact, the problem statement is something that from a company standpoint, usually, is just, it doesn't matter. It's just an excuse for them to get an engagement with colleges and with campus students.

Right. Thank you. So how is the can-doing case competitions different? So the problem statement doesn't matter. The students know it. The companies know it. And it's all just theoretical and abstract. Right. So that was something that we really found interesting.

And we said, okay, is there a way to make case competitions relevant again? And the way you make something relevant again is you go to the heart of what the problem statement is and make it completely positioned in the real world. And this was really how we started it. So we said, look, we are the Ken. everything that we do is about what's really happening right now, the current context matters. And we genuinely believe that students are capable of coming up with really new and interesting ways of solving problems that is immensely valuable and things that companies don't generally see coming. So last year, if you see, we started off by saying that, look, the hottest thing that's happening is quick commerce. So we said there are five quick commerce companies, all of them battling it out.

And that was the context last year. And we said all of them have access to $1 billion of capital, which was actually true at that time. Pick any company. And you have access to a billion dollars of capital. How would you win? And that was the second part. The second part is that we made the problem statement ambiguous.

And that was deliberate because when you make it ambiguous, because again, that's also a reflection of what happens in the real world. Got it. That's very interesting. So what were some of the pitches like? teams came up with some really interesting stuff. One team was very interesting where they said that we will build what they call the AWS of dark stores

which means that they said look, companies are going to keep fighting this out. Brands always are going to want faster delivery. So we are just going to build dark stores all over the country and we will lease it out to whoever wants it. The value is in owning the infrastructure of the business. And then another team said what we are going to do is out of this billion dollars, we're going to spend some money

and we are going to acquire Farm Easy. because we think that pharmacy delivery is the next big thing and we are going to acquire that company and we think that they have the licenses and that's how we will do. So the reason I bring this up is because now these are very interesting solutions, right? And these are interesting solutions

that you wouldn't have otherwise got through a regular case competition. And we had a great grand finale. We had like five judges. We had Navi Tiwari from Inmobi. We had Rucci Kahlia. We had Professor Risha Krishna Krishna from I'm Bangal. Adyaray from Capital Mine.

And all of them had their own perspectives. Like one comes from a capital market side. One comes from research, equity research side. So that's what we did last year, which was fun. This year, we said, okay, let's take this one notch up. And we decided to add something, which I'm sure you know, Rachel, which is what is the big and the hottest thing right now. AI. So we said, okay, can we do AI? Our incentives were just, how do we get fantastic solutions that are valuable in and of itself. And the thing that we found out when we were talking to founders and executives were,

everybody across companies were just really paranoid about what AI can do to them. And yeah, so they were just saying, look, AI is here. Our biggest fear is that there is going to be some small startup or a competitor that is going to be AI first. and is going to come up with something that we never saw coming. They're going to take a significant part of our business away, which was the part that we said, okay, if this is what you're all worried about, let's talk about that.

So hence, this year's case competition was what we called it, disrupt the incumbents. So we said, pick a real life company. And you're not role playing as them. In fact, you're doing the reverse. You are attacking them. from the outside, you're analyzing them, looking at their weaknesses and saying they are vulnerable on these few aspects. And we think that if we had an AI first approach or maybe it's a product, maybe it's a marketing strategy, maybe it's a design, maybe it's a business model.

We can attack them and we can win by taking this much market share away, these kind of customers and this kind of renew. This is how we will hurt them. This is the opportunity. assuming that you're the small nimble team with access to AI, what is it that you see that all of these companies miss and what's the next wave of innovation going to look like? The last part was we said we didn't want to do presentations because quite frankly we did presentations last year

and sitting through presentations is, well, let's just say it's not a lot of fun. And we thought about it and we said, look, one of the promises of AI that it really does is it says that, look, anyone can be a buildup. Anyone can create things now. The cost of creating things has come down to near zero. So if you want to create, say, a landing page, you want to talk about your product, you want to do a prototype, anyone can do it. So if anyone can do it, can students do it too? And if students can do it, can they show it?

So hence, that's why we change the name of the competition. So it's no longer a case study competition. We called it a case build competition. So he said that's what it is. And this is the first time that's happening in India, a case build. Yeah, I think to the best of my knowledge, the first time anywhere in the world. But what we're, yeah, what we're doing is we're saying attack a company, do whatever you'd want to do. And make it feasible, make it innovative, make it creative, make it realistic, make the context matter and just go for it.

And that's what we did. That was a challenge. So hence, India's first case build competition. That's what we launched this year. Amazing. And like conceptually, it's. quite different and interesting, right? So I wanted to ask, what were some of the teams that made it to the finals,

like what kind of teams made it? And because from what I saw in the competition, there were teams that were really attacking very surprising sectors like, you know, temples and schools. So do you feel that this says something about how this newer generation is thinking about business problems now? So three, four things. I think number one was we were really interested in what,

happens when we tell, you know, a set of teams, just attack whoever you want to attack. So you're really interested in whom they would pick because you had around thousand plus teams from 127 colleges. That's the other thing. We didn't want to keep it restricted to just business schools. If anyone can do it, then students from any campus should be able to do it. It doesn't matter you're from a business school or a law school or an engineering college or humanities.

So there were 136 companies that all of these. students pick to disrupt. And I'm going to read out some of them just so that you get a sense of how broad it is. McKinsey, Make My Trip, Bayju's, Netflix, Bajaj finance, ICICL Lombard, Malabar Gold and Diamonds,

Dirubai School, EY, India, Vakil Search, wed me good, Zillow, Zoom. So you see the range, right? Literally nobody was safe. Everybody was vulnerable. Right. So it's like, you know, students aren't really finding it very difficult to find vulnerabilities, right? Even in the biggest companies.

But other than the ones that you listed, PJK, were there like certain other sectors or companies that really surprised you, like something you didn't expect at all? I'll tell you the thing that surprised me the most. The thing that surprised me the most was not what the students did. The thing that surprised me the most was what companies did. Because after we went live with this, some companies reached out to us and said,

yeah and they said this is really cool we are also worried about these things can we put ourselves as targets please and we said okay so what do you want to do and these three companies said if you pick us you can work with us to create your strategies on how you plan to disrupt us so we also understand how you're thinking and we can help you course correct and get some you know better ways of disrupting us and we get access to that kind of a thinking which I thought it was interesting. But what ended up happening was because the thing that you put forward is here are the three companies that you can pick. And the three companies that came forward were Narana Health, who basically came and said,

look, we will give time with Viren Shetty, who's, of course, the head of Narana Health right now and the MD there. And then, of course, the second company that came was CBRI, which is the world's largest real estate company which had Deepak Diwani, who's the chief strategy officer from Dhabiwani, he put himself up and said, yes, I'm going to see what teams want to do. And of course, the third company was Zeroda. So these three companies came forward as volunteer case subjects. And it's not surprising that a big majority of the teams picked these three companies. I think the second surprising thing was how people interpreted companies and incumbents. Yeah, because I think many people, of course, went down the path of picking specific companies,

which also helped because you can actually understand what they're doing. I was actually quite surprised by how teams saw incumbents. So as an example, one of the top 10 finalists was this team that picked Levin Labs as an incumbent. We're a very strange company to pick because Evan Dabs is also an AI company and I think it's barely like three to four years old. So already you're saying the incumbent that we are picking is a disruptor in some sense and we're going to disrupt them. which was interesting. I think, oh, another team in the top 10 picked the traditional temple economy,

which is, I think, the only team in the top 10 that did not pick an incumbent by name, but instead said, we are going to disrupt temples as a whole, especially in terms of queuing, in terms of darshanes, in terms of the experience of it,

help and quote-unquote disrupt the existing tech, whatever exists across these temples. Yeah, apart from that, I think, a surprising number of teams were very bold to pick US tech companies to disrupt. We didn't explicitly say you ought to pick an Indian incumbent, but I thought it was implied. One really brave team decided to go and disrupt Google, and good luck with that. That's why there were teams that said, we're going to disrupt SAP, or we're going to disrupt Salesforce, or Zoom, even Zoom.

And I thought that was unusual and interesting, but also, I think, reveals the ambition of these students. So it's not just that they're not happy just going and disrupting. like, you know, all these other kinds of Indian companies. Right. That's, yeah, like you said, you know, nobody's safe. Everybody's vulnerable. Everybody's in a tough spot.

So to pick on that a little bit more, I was curious because building an AI first disruption was the challenge, right? And because AI is becoming such a catch-all term, you know, you put that as a label on something. It immediately becomes like the newest, coolest, most innovative. thing, right? And I and because I was watching the finale, I was wondering, do you think, at least with the finalists, were all of these disruptions

that couldn't have happened without AI? 100%. 100%. I think for every, for most of the teams, AI was like, it definitely foundational. For instance, all of the

teams used AI and had AI for strategies to disrupt some of these incumbents and some of them started to look plausible. I can see this happening. It's a bit of a long shot, but I can see it happening in some way. So that was something that happened.

The second thing was, and the other reason why AI was definitely foundational was, and we couldn't have done this before, is asking teams to say, create prototypes, create landing pages. By the way, on the Ken, we have listed every single one of the teams, every single incumbent that they've picked,

and we have also linked to the prototype. So you can click and play with the prototypes yourself. And all the landing pages have been created using AI tools. And these are AI tools like Versil and lovable and emergent. So people talk about wipecoding. Everyone wipecoded a website of how they're planning to disrupt these companies. So which, so there's a lot of show don't tell as well, which I thought was really nice.

The third thing, of course, in AI was, and you could sort of tell this. I don't know if Rachel you could tell this in the finale. Like you could tell that some of the teams had actually used a lot of AI to create the solutions, which is fine, I guess, when you're creating like landing pages, but when you start creating business strategies and go to chat GPT or any of these other tools, they have started talking like how AI talks, haven't you noticed? Didn't you see teams when they were presenting saying stuff like, this is not just a disruption, this is a reinvention?

So when you say it's not X, it's Y. I've always seen this in AI written text. Now I've started to find it interesting that people are talking like that. Right. So another thing I was thinking about during the finale is what exactly makes it difficult for, you know, the incumbents to use these solutions themselves? No, I think that's a classical and a much longer story of disruption. So I think the thing about disruption that we believe, and I've written about this multiple times, is disruption is one of those things where everyone knows it's happening. Right. Nobody says it's not happening. And this has happened over wave after wave in history. in tech. And despite that, companies that are incumbents typically can't do much about it.

They have to dramatically reinvent themselves in order to match up and face this kind of disruption. In fact, that was one of the questions that we asked. Like in the grand finale, teams had to answer the question of why would an incumbent not just replicate this AI strategy that you have? And in most cases, it comes down to a combination of understanding of disrupt. theory, which essentially talks about that incumbents that when they're in a position of strength can make perfectly rational decisions in the face of disruption and still lose, right? One example of it is if you look at, say, what happened to Kodak in the 70s and 80s. Now, when digital film comes or digital cameras come, Kodak knows that this is the future,

but there is no way for Kodak to adopt it without it cannibalizing its existing business. So what you do is And you look at digital cameras and say Well, this is just going to be A fad or it's a very low quality version. And I think a lot of companies may think like that about AI and say This is just a low quality thing. They can

automate a few things But these things are not just important for us Or they can take away these kind of customers. We don't want these kind of customers And they go up, they go up, they go up until they find out that oh, the technology has gotten much better and we are cornered. So it's a much classical story of disruption.

Got it. So could you tell us a little bit about the team that won? What exactly were the criteria that they met for the judges that made them win? The winning team was a team from IAMMDabad that picked Narana health to disrupt. I think it's fair to say that the judges felt that they were the judges felt that they were the team that combined a few things, the practicality of the approach combined with feasibility, combined with, is it innovative and creative? Did they have a solid business model in place?

And was it like kind of viable? And I think of all of those, I felt like the IMMDabad theme, I felt like the decision was fair. That's amazing. So what's next for the case-built competition? Have you guys thought about what's happening next year? I think, yeah. See, the case competition is something we have a lot of fun with.

And we have an ambition to make it bigger every year. I think I can say we'll probably, we like this format that we have with respect to disrupting specific incumbents. But I have a few ideas on some interesting twists and turns and where I want to introduce into the competition itself. And yeah, and finally, we want to make it in person. We are always interested. And I think I just want to use this opportunity. It's very early. We are still in, we literally just finished the case competition.

but if any company is interested in sponsoring parts of this or if you want to step up and be a volunteer case subject for all of these students to attack you, you can write to us and we'll see what we can do. Thank you so much, P.Brick is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily.

long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Rachel Vargis, and edited by Rajiv Sien.