This ISB duo and their case study on India’s grand old recycling company won them an int’l competition

Many start-ups are taking up the cause of waste management yet, there is one visionary company who started working on recycling plastic in 1969, much before we even thought of plastic as a problem. Called The Shakti Plastic Industries in Mumbai, it is this iconic company that Ahaana Mahanti, a Research Associate and Sanjana Prabala, an Independent Consultant, who are part of ISB-CBM (Indian School of Business-Centre for Business Markets) based their case study on and went on to win the 2021 Fox International Case Competition. Their case was titled Shakti Plastics Industries: Enabling a circular plastics value chain and explained about this age-old company and its methods to adopt a plastics value chain that is circular in nature.

As ISB is a part of Ernst & Young's Institute for Emerging Market Studies (IEMS, a group of institutions that study macroeconomics in various markets), the duo received a grant from the MNC for their research. When they jumped down the rabbit hole to look at corporate responsibility and climate change for a case, it was Sanjana Prabala who suggested that they zero in on Shakti Plastics. Though they don't market themselves the way new-age start-ups do, this Mumbai-based company's collection network is spread across the country and they are in the process of installing technology to recycle sanitary napkins and diapers as well and this was enough to convince the duo that it would make for an excellent case. After undertaking three virtual workshops on how to write and teach a case, they started working full-swing.

A case is used as a teaching tool in several B-schools and other institutions which presents a business decision problem, for which students need to come up with an analysis. "How does one teach this case, especially in the age of the pandemic and the context of India aiming to phase out single-use plastic by 2022, was also taken into consideration," she shared. All the meetings with Tony Thomas, who leads their Sustainability and CSR, and Managing Director Rahul V Podaar, happened online, which is where all the primary data came from. The secondary data came from reports. "But it's not about just assimilating information, one needs to be creative and create a dilemma for the case. Designing such cases is an important part of creating awareness among students," she adds.

Winning the 2021 Fox International Case Competition gets them a cash prize of USD 1,000 and a promise that their case will be published by Ivey Publishing, which co-sponsored the competition with Temple University, USA.