NU Business students victorious at Case Competition
Business students from Nipissing University recently travelled to Sault Ste. Marie to compete in the 12th annual Business Case Competition, and one team came away with a trophy for the Best Use of Technology.
The event, hosted by Algoma University, attracted business students from across Northern Ontario.
This year was Nipissing’s third year competing. The NU contingent was made up of two teams. The first team featured students Jeremy Butterworth, Hailey Martin, Dan Miller, and Cooper Allen. The second team featured Landon Larabie, Andrew Wood, and Mark Frederick.
For the competition, teams are given a case and provided three hours to perform a case analysis and then create a 20 minute presentation for a panel of judges. The use of technology, such as phones or laptops, is outlawed during this time, which meant no further research was allowed beside the case that was provided. A ten-minute question period follows the presentation. Teams compete in a similar fashion in both the morning and the afternoon.
While there was no technology allowed in the case competition process, Nipissing’s winning team, the team featuring Butterworth, Martin, Miller, and Allen, chose to make recommendations based around the implementation of technology, such as social media for generating viral marketing campaigns. They also created complete story boards of their ideas to be implemented into a commercial for the company to use to attract consumers.
“What set our group apart was our creativity, Hailey, Dan, and I are all marketing students that like to think outside the box and be creative. Cooper is an accounting student who thinks very analytically, which was a tremendous help when thinking about budgeting and numbers,” said Butterworth. “We were all able to effectively collaborate together to brainstorm and further implement our ideas in the case competition by all respectively listening to each others ideas.”
“The overall experience was tremendous,” continued Butterworth. “We were able to take part in a competition that caused us to be out of our traditional comfort zone of having technology available and to think critically about two different topics in a short amount of time. It was also a great event to network and meet other business professionals. We were able to meet Mark Brand, a social entrepreneur, to ask him questions to see if we were on the right track. He provided a lot of great insight on ways to strengthen our arguments and reassured us we were going in the right direction, which allowed us to have confidence moving forward.”