ABSTRACT
Indian Institute(s) of Technology (IITs in short) are public technology-based universities in India. Declared to be 'institutions of national importance', they have been at the forefront of technical education. Well-known for their all-rounded human-centric approach, IITs have encouraged sports. In the past, IIT Bombay-one of the oldest among them-has revelled in sporting glory. However, recent trends in Inter-IIT sports meets seem to indicate stagnation. Some stakeholders of the institute feel that the time is ripe to implement innovative pilots at the grassroot level to alleviate this vexing problem. We take participation in biathlon as a proxy for fitness needed for sporting activities and try to analyse the problem better by undertaking an observation-aided problem structuring exercise to reach at actor-clustered root causes for the slow uptake of practices. Lack of motivation fuelled by valence deficit among students and lack of awareness about the synergistic impact of regular practices on other facets of life, emerge to be high-potential root causes. This exercise is followed by the exploration of alternative group-level virtual distributed-practice ideas (given the context of COVID-19) to leverage management of technology (MoT) of emerging technologies to improve practices. Our work adds to the extant body of knowledge along the methodological dimension by expounding in discreet details the steps involved in problem structuring. Structured and sustainable initiatives of practices piloted as a part of this study can be implemented on a larger scale and can be communicated to the higher authorities through the Institute Sports Council for immediate implementation. © 2020 Towards the Digital World and Industry X.0 - Proceedings of the 29th International Conference of the International Association for Management of Technology, IAMOT 2020. All rights reserved.