Day 1:
Mr Shekhar Gupta, the editor in Chief of the Indian express, inaugurated the event with the keynote address on the theme of Vista 2008 – ‘Emerging economies, Emerging Realities’. The flagship event of IIMB Vista, ‘Numero Uno, the hunt for the next CEO’, started off with the icebreaker rounds. This year, Numero Uno turned international with students representing McGill University, Yale and Lahore University of Management studies.

Another event ‘The Bzzwings B-plan competition’ was contested by over 320 teams all over India. Eight of these teams, three from the IIMs who reached the finals presented the plans. Pritam Sarkar and Smriti Khullar from IIM Bangalore bagged the first prize with their venture – Professional Trainers is firm that intends to bring the world of wellness right at the door step. The runners up, Anshul Gupta, Radhika Tandon and Adithya MR were also from IIM Bangalore with their social entrepreneurship venture that was based on Seed Distribution in rural areas.

Mr Ramesh Kumar, VP Strategic Planning, Ogilvy shared his views on good ad-making through an advertising workshop. The seminar was followed by a competition that asked people to come up with advertising ideas for one of three concepts and the winner was the team selling cattle insurance.

Day 2:
Gurcharan Das, the author of India Unbound, spoke about where India is positioned right now, how it got that way and where it can go in the future. The debating competition Dhrishtikone was won by the team from IIM-Bangalore, beating out the team from XLRI Jamshedpur. Finesse, the flagship event of the finance club had 250 people participating in the elimination round.

Competitions were held on various management modules like ‘Hire Wise’ made participants to solve the HR problems of a company, ‘Retailor’ focused on marketing through pricing and operations & ‘Baadshah’ searched for an individual in advertising, and was vied for by over 200 contestants. The second round of ‘Trojan Horse’ had six teams tested on strategy in a simulated retail market. The highlight was the final round of the brand-new event, ‘Sparsh’. In the previous rounds, teams had visited two NGOs in Bangalore to get a feel of the problems faced by each. The final round involved each team presenting their list of solutions to representatives from the NGOs. In ‘Numero Uno’ participants were divided into teams and given certain physical and mental tasks to complete. The next round saw each participant being given a certain amount of seed capital a and asked to go anywhere in Bangalore and generate profits.

The panel discussion on ‘Strategic Co-operation among Emerging Economies’ saw participants like Professor Jayanta Roy (CII), Mr Narayan Ramachandran (Global Head, Emerging Markets Division, Morgan Stanley), Prof Saikat Sinha Roy of Jadhavpur University, Mr Chris Oberoi (Managing Director, Goldman Sachs), Prof PG Apte of IIM Bangalore and Sanjay Mansabdar, Allegro Capital Entrepreneur debate on the topic.

The day rounded off with the traditional Post Meridian dinner, where all the participants and students met and build contacts with representatives from the industry.