Disrupt the Incumbents
This year’s edition isn’t a regular case-study competition—it’s a case-build challenge, and it’s built to match how the best companies now hire: you must show, not just tell.
Because why just study the future when AI lets students build it right now?
Case
Inside the boardrooms of India’s biggest companies, the question isn’t if disruption is coming—it’s where it’ll come from.
For a long time, leaders at these companies were primarily concerned with safer, more conventional interests: quarterly targets, strategy planning sessions, or sometimes, showing up on the right podcasts.
Then came AI. Suddenly, the world changed.
The questions that companies are asking themselves have also changed. Across all types of industries and sectors, incumbents are waking up to a hard truth: they’re more vulnerable than ever. Small, scrappy, AI-first startups can outbuild, outcompete, and outsmart them.
This realisation is sinking in because some companies are recognising that we are entering an era of the great reset, one driven by artificial intelligence that is transforming how companies are built, how markets are defined, and how startups reach their customers.
Once, Jeff Bezos famously declared, “Your margin is my opportunity.” That is the old era. In the age of AI, the new opportunities lie in the inefficiencies of old, bloated incumbents holding onto customers who need more but don’t yet realize it.
This reset is also reshaping careers, as senior executives leave established firms to launch fresh ventures, spotting chances to build products from the ground up without legacy constraints.
Some students understand this shift. They spot weaknesses and opportunities, and take the next step to build real solutions. These will be the ones companies compete to recruit and hire—or who build the next wave of influential companies.
They will hold the ultimate edge in shaping the careers and roles of the future.
The Challenge
This case-build challenge is an evolution of The Ken’s Case Competition held last year, stepped up from a format that was both unique and powerful.
This edition of The Ken’s Case Competition goes one step further in acknowledging the real world. It serves as a glimpse into this reset, offering the challenge of starting from scratch: what markets will new startups pursue, and which incumbent companies will they identify as weak and vulnerable?
In most case competitions, students step into the shoes of a company and design a theoretical strategy to tackle a business problem.
Our competition inverts this.
This year, The Ken’s Case Competition casts students as disruptors.
They get to decide which company to challenge and how they would do it. Students will choose a real, established company they want to disrupt—whether it's a market leader in fintech, a dominant player in e-commerce, a traditional bank, or any other established player across sectors. They'll come up with their core insight and identify specific opportunities. We've intentionally kept this open-ended to see which companies they're most eager to challenge. Participants will have to get creative. Nothing is off the table.
And finally, they must demonstrate what they’re going to do.
That’s why we’re calling this a case-build competition, It’s the first of its kind, organised in an exciting format.
Volunteer Case Subjects
What makes this competition even more unique is that some companies have stepped forward as volunteer case subjects.CBRE,Narayana Health and Zerodha have confidently opened their doors, inviting participants to study them as potential disruption targets.
This is a rare opportunity: instead of working with limited public information, participating teams can gain unprecedented access to executive leaders' perspectives. Both companies have committed their senior executives' time to provide guidance, challenge your thinking, and give feedback on your approach.
This isn't just about transparency—it's about these companies' confidence in their market position and their eagerness to see how the next generation of entrepreneurs might approach their space. For participants, it means access to information that would typically take months of research to gather, if it were available at all.
Teams are free to choose any company as their target—including the competition's volunteer case subjects or any other established player they wish to challenge.
CBRE
CBRE Group, Inc. is a leading global commercial real estate services and investment firm. It operates in over 100 countries, offering services such as property leasing and sales, property & portfolio management, valuation, investment advisory, and development consulting.
Read the case on CBRE
Narayana Health
Narayana Health (formerly Narayana Hrudayalaya) is an Indian private healthcare chain founded by Dr. Devi Shetty. It runs a network of multispecialty and super-specialty hospitals across India (and one in the Cayman Islands), focusing on affordable, high-quality medical care.
Read the case on Narayana Health
Zerodha
Zerodha is India's second-largest stockbroker and a fintech pioneer. It serves millions of retail investors, offering zero-brokerage equity trading, derivatives and commodities trading, and more. By the time fintech companies started launching brokerage businesses in India, Zerodha was already deeply established and nearly impossible to dislodge.
Read the case on Zerodha
Goals for Participants
To win the challenge, you will have to:
- Pick a real-world industry dominated by big players that are ripe for disruption. It could be one of the volunteer case subjects or any other established player from any sector—strategy consulting firms, UPI payment leaders, HR software giants, FMCG leaders, automobile manufacturers, financial services incumbents, or anyone else. You’ll carefully analyse the company, do market research and conduct conversations with users, evaluate what the top competitors are doing, their revenue channels, product and service offerings, and consumer behaviours.
- Spot an opportunity and choose your angle of attack. Create an AI-first strategy that capitalises on the incumbent’s blind spots and weaknesses. Your goal: use their size against themselves and steal market share. You’ll flesh out this strategy over multiple elimination rounds.
- In the final round, you’ll build AI-powered prototypes that show how you’ll turn these opportunities into products.
While shaping the AI-first strategy to disrupt the incumbents, you’ll have to pick one of the following axes along which your team will craft your strategy:
- Business Model – Reinventing pricing and monetisation (freemium, usage-based, bundles) to unlock demand incumbents overlook.
- Product – Building new product categories, or combining human expertise with AI to deliver what’s impossible otherwise.
- Design – Crafting superior user experiences that feel obvious in hindsight but overlooked by incumbents.
- Execution and Building – Shipping faster, leveraging new stacks and infrastructure, and iterating at speeds incumbents’ processes don’t allow.
- Marketing – Rethinking acquisition, positioning, brand, partnerships, and distribution channels to tell a story that spreads far and wide.
Questions
While submitting your case solution, your team will have to answer the following questions:
1. Which company will your team disrupt?
2. Why have you selected this company as your target? [100 words]
3. What makes this company vulnerable to disruption? [100 words]
4. What is your strategy to disrupt this company? [100 words]
5. Summarise your strategy in one sentence.
6. Along which axes will you challenge this company? [Select maximum 3]
7. How would you allocate 100 units of resources across your chosen axes?
8. What does AI enable in your 2025 strategy that wasn't possible before 2022, prior to the launch of ChatGPT? [50 words]
9. Explain why this company will not be able to replicate or defend against your strategy. [100 words]
10. What makes your team uniquely suited to this challenge compared to other teams? [100 words]
11. Assuming your strategy succeeds, how many months will it take for you to win? [X months]
12. How will you define success at the end of this period? Specify the key metrics and tangible outcomes you expect to achieve. [50 words]
13. What are 2-4 major milestones on your path to victory? What critical resources—e.g. capital, tech, talent—are needed to achieve each one? [50 words]
Evaluation Criteria
All case submissions will be evaluated using five criteria, all equally weighted:
Innovation: Is the solution fresh, counterintuitive, unique, and creative?
Clarity: Is the solution communicated clearly? Is it specific?
Feasibility: Is it a practical solution? Can it be implemented in a reasonable way?
Thoroughness: Is the solution meticulous and detailed?
Context: Is the solution unique to the company, its competitors, and the context?
Register Team
Registrations for the case-build competition are now closed.
If you’ve submitted a solution, we’ll contact you if you are shortlisted.
Eligibility
The Ken’s Case Competition is open to full-time college students (UG/PG) across India.
- Each team must have three students.
- All members of a team must be from the same institution.
- There is no limit to the number of participating teams from a single institution.
- No student can be a part of multiple teams.
- No changes to the teams will be allowed after submission.
- The Ken eserves the right to validate the information submitted by participants, and to disqualify any team at its sole discretion.
Schedule
Stage 1: Case Submission
- The case submission forms the basis for shortlists, and teams will have to build on the solutions they’ve submitted in this round if they qualify for future rounds. For the first round, the case submissions are evaluated based on answers to the questions at the end of the case.
- We’ll begin accepting submissions starting 27 September 2025 on The Ken’s website. Registered teams will receive an email when the submission window opens.
- The deadline for all case submissions is 15 October 2025, 23:59:59. There will be no extensions.
Stage 2: Semi-finals
- Selections for the semi-finals will be made based on the scores received by teams in the case submission round. After qualifying for the semi-finals, all teams will receive an additional problem statement that builds on their original case submission.
- There are no limits on the number of teams from a single institution that qualify for this round.
- The deadline for submissions is 15 November 2025, 23:59:59. There will be no extensions.
Stage 3: Finals
- Selections for the finals will be made based on scores received in the case submission round plus scores from the semi-final round. Finalists in this round will be asked to bring their solutions to life using AI tools.
- The finalists will present their case solutions to a panel of judges composed of India’s leading founders, CEOs, academics, operators, and market experts.
- The case-build competition’s final round will take place in December 2025.
- The winning team of The Ken’s Case Competition 2025 will receive a cash prize of Rs 10 lakh.
All participants explicitly acknowledge and agree to comply with the Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions of The Ken’s Case Competition in its entirety listed here.
For any inquiries, please contact us [email protected]
