From 112 Ideas to One Winning Venture: Inside the 2026 MiM Innovation Tournament

In seven weeks, Questrom MiM students moved from early-stage ideas to working prototypes, commercial strategies, and investor-ready pitches. For the team behind VitalLoop, the process ended with first place—but the real story was everything it took to get there.

At the beginning of the 2026 Master in Management Innovation Tournament, there were 112 ideas. Seven weeks later, four teams stood in front of a panel of experienced judges for the tournament’s Shark Tank-style finale. To get there, they had to do considerably more than come up with an interesting concept. Each team had to identify and validate a real customer problem, build a working minimum viable product, determine who would buy it first and why, map a path to scale, develop defensible unit economics, and make the case that the venture could become a viable business. For the 2026 winning team, that venture was VitalLoop.

Start with the problem

VitalLoop began with a healthcare coordination problem in India. Through primary research, including conversations with doctors, the team learned how urgent requests for blood can depend on a fragmented process of manual calls among hospitals and blood banks. The students began asking what would happen if that coordination could take place through one shared system instead. Their answer was a real-time coordination platform designed to connect hospitals and blood banks, using predictive matching to help identify available supply more efficiently. Rather than stopping with the concept, the seven-member team built a functioning MVP and continued refining it as they gathered feedback throughout the tournament.

That process mattered.

The team had to make choices about the product itself, but also about the business around it: Who was the target customer? What problem was urgent enough to drive adoption? How would the venture enter the market? What would it cost to deliver? How could the model expand?

Those are the same questions built into the MiM Innovation Tournament. The project asks students to develop a prototype and commercial launch plan that addresses customer acquisition, operational scale-up, investment sequencing, and return on investment before pitching the business to actual investors.

Build. Test. Defend. Repeat.

The tournament is intentionally iterative. Ideas move through successive rounds of feedback and evaluation, forcing teams to revisit assumptions as they go. In 2026, nine judges helped select the four teams that would advance to the finale, where four additional “Sharks” challenged the finalists on their businesses. For VitalLoop, every round meant another opportunity to sharpen the product and the story behind it.

Team member Bhavika Rustagi described repeatedly returning to the design after team discussions, pitches, and feedback. As the weeks progressed, the team became more confident not only in the product but in how the pieces of the business fit together, from go-to-market strategy to operations to the customer value proposition. That progression is an important part of the experience. Students are not simply evaluated on whether they reach the “right” answer. They have to respond when evidence challenges an assumption, make decisions with imperfect information, divide responsibilities across a team, and defend those decisions when someone pushes back.

By the final round, the work has to hold up in the room. The final challenge in a year built around doing. The Innovation Tournament comes at the end of Questrom’s nine-month MiM, a program structured around challenge-driven, hands-on learning. Across the year, small teams take on a series of increasingly complex projects that require them to apply what they are learning across disciplines rather than treating finance, marketing, analytics, operations, and strategy as separate subjects. The final module brings those capabilities together around commercialization and innovation. That is what made VitalLoop more than an idea competition.

Ananya Mullick’s original concept became the foundation for a seven-person team that included Bhavika Rustagi, Yi-Hsuan Lin, Sumair Patel, Zijing Liu, Evelyn (Yuelin) Xu, and Vishal Chhimpa. Together, they moved from problem discovery to product development to a commercial case—and ultimately to first place in the 2026 tournament. But winning was only one measure of what they built.

In seven weeks, an idea had been questioned, researched, tested, redesigned, costed, positioned, and defended before people who could challenge whether the business actually made sense. That is the point of the Innovation Tournament, and of the MiM experience around it: learning business by having to do the work of business.