Wipro concludes “Brainstorm 2014”

Wipro has announced successful completion of the final round of “Brainstorm 2014” – The Nokia Networks and Wipro R&D IT Challenge, an initiative to foster telecom innovation with younger talents and attract them to join the workforce of the two companies.

The first edition of “Brainstorm 2014” provided an opportunity to the engineering and B-school students to present their ideas that can help shape the future of telecommunications industry. This contest was open to pre-final year students from selected engineering and management campuses. The contest saw enthusiastic participation, with over 400 registrations from over 30 premier business management and engineering colleges, across the country, including the IIMs and IITs.

The top three teams in this year’s contest were from NITIE Mumbai, IIFT Kolkata and DoMS, IIT Madras. The idea on data service innovation presented by the team from IIFT Kolkata was announced as the best by a panel consisting of members from both Wipro and Nokia Networks. The team from DoMS, IIT Madras, which presented an idea on automatic meter reading (AMR) implementation in the telecom industry, was the first runner-up, while NITIE Mumbai received the award for the most innovative idea on real-time big data analysis for tailormade mobile plans. The top ideas suggested innovative solutions to deal with challenges in the areas of Telco Cloud and Big Data Analytics.

Vanessa Candow, Head of IT for R&D, Nokia Networks, handed over the prizes to the winning teams in the presence of Joint Innovation Council members from both Nokia Networks and Wipro at the Grand Finale held in Bangalore. The winners will also have a chance to develop their ideas and deploy the solution in a test environment at the Wipro campus in Bangalore.

In September 2013, Nokia Networks and Wipro created a joint Innovation Council with an aim to take their partnership a notch above from delivering IT services and projects, to fostering a culture of innovation. Clearly, academia was one such channel to get innovative ideas from, and hence, Brainstorm 2014 was launched as a key initiative by the members of this Council.