Summary 

This post demonstrates a new process of recruitment for a multi-national manufacturing company. Every year this company recruits interns from very elite and prestigious engineering and management institute in India as Summer Interns to work on new designs and ‘wicked’ problems.

Objectives:

1) Come up with patented products to improve their market share and to penetrate niche markets.

2) To solve some of their ‘wicked problems‘ in different areas.

For this the design and management interns work during their summer vacation for a period of 60 days on a paid basis – the payment for which is quite handsome.

This has been applied for the past 3 years which has produced about 12 patents and solutions to at least 5 difficult management problems. The design interns work up to the prototype stage before they leave to join their college sessions. Similarly, the management interns submit and present a written document of their findings along with their solutions.

Institutes from where selections are made:

1. Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

2. Vinod Gupta School of Management, Kharagpur

Highlights of the selection Process

1. A Self Organized Peer Assessment & Learning Method was used.

2. This consisted of two portions — a) written peer assessment b) interactions over Twitter (introduced from this year).

3. The written assessment was for a day for both streams

4. The interactions over Twitter continued over a two day period for each stream.

5. This year, while 40 MBA students challenged the assessment 85  Engineering students (from Mechanical, Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering) challenged the assessment

6. While 4 MBA interns were selected to work on management problems, 14 Design interns were selected for design related work

What are being assessed? 

Participants were assessed for the following: –