Announcing the Finalists for the HCL MBA M-Prize

A grand total of 114 entries from students representing the world's top business schools were submitted by the March 20th deadline for the HCL MBA M-Prize. Students were challenged to invent a Hack to address any deep problem with management practice. MIX partner HCL provided an attractive incentive: a budget of $50,000 to test the winning Hack within the living laboratory of that corporation. Young management innovators rose handsomely to this challenge.

The judges for this round of the competition were: Anoop Tiwari, HR Director of HCL; MIX Mavericks Gary Hamel, Julian Birkinshaw, and Umair Haque; and MIX Editorial Director Polly LaBarre. In no particular order, here are the seven Finalists the judges selected:

• In Can your organisation "handle the truth"?, Mark Young of Massey University in New Zealand imagines applying the Fishbowl technique to making corporate communications more transparent and direct, even when the news is bad.
• Performance vs. capability - what's the difference? from Shelley McIvor of Warwick University in England proposes daily real-time polling of employees' engagement levels to compress the typically annual cycle of evaluating the degree to which "10/10" of potential contribution is being inspired.
• IMD Team #10 offer The organisation structure as free market, a radical re-imagining of the traditional employee-manager relationship, in which the employee selects the manager, who is in turn rewarded with budget and scope in proportion to the results his or her team produces.
• Evolve the organization by measuring and developing its consciousness, by Allan Jaenicke of MIT, posits a framework for a more holistic approach to performance measurement based on developing more future-focused listening and thinking capabilities within the organization.
• LBS Group 10 suggests companies should Stop incremental change and foster "Bold Moves", by requiring teams proposing major initiatives to offer at least one 'bold move scenario' that consciously escapes the gravity of incremental analysis.
• Team Aim High of the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines offers the Entrepreneur Employee - Way to Innovate in Corporations, a series of market mechanisms that animate internal discussions and resource allocations to new innovations.
• Late Night Pizza: Bringing Hackathons to Professional Service Firms, from Alka Tandon and David Roth of Harvard Business School, proposes a model that overcomes the limitations of innovating in a services environment by gathering volunteers for a food-fueled day of rapid generation, design, and presentation of new solutions.

In the final round of the challenge, MIX coaches will work with the Finalists to shape their Hacks based on feedback from the judges. One goal is to elaborate the details of how each of their management experiments would be carried out at HCL.

Our thanks go to all the entrants who submitted Hacks to the M-Prize. Your efforts were wide-ranging, often bold, and invariably optimistic - surely attributes reflecting the best hope for re-inventing management. We hope you will continue to cheer on the Finalists by adding your comments and ratings as their Hacks develop.

Stay tuned - the Grand Prize winner will be announced at the end of the month.