Four graduate students from Daniels College of Business won $20,000 after competing in the Aspen Institute’s 2012 Business & Society International MBA Case Competition in New York City on April 13.
The competition was created in 2010 by the Aspen Institute, an international nonprofit that hosts seminars, policy discussions and conferences all over the country, and includes a focus on the environment and ethics in addition to the pre-existing emphasis on the meeting of business and society.
“Business as usual simply won’t work in the long-term, and the opportunity to apply the sustainable business practice concepts we’ve been studying was incredible,” said one of the winners Peter Knox. “The case [took] place at the end of 2011, beginning of 2012, and as such is about as current as you can get.”
The team was made up of David Lashen, a first-year MBA student in Sustainable Business Strategy; Qionglin Dai, a first-year MS student in Finance; Andy Reger, a first-year MBA student in Finance and Renewable Energy; and Knox, a second-year International MBA student in Business Intelligence and Analytics. All of the students are pursuing their degrees full-time.
Lashen, Dai, Reger and Knox had one weekend to format their case study, from March 23-March 26.
According to Knox, they then submitted their written case to a team of Daniels faculty, who judged the three case analyses they received and selected the best one. The case was then sent to the Aspen Institute for the second round, where judges selected the top five out of 25 business schools. The final five teams had from April 3-11 to format a 10-minute presentation. and were then invited to New York to present their case to a live panel of corporate representatives. They were allowed to add feedback received during the first round, but could not change the recommendations they had originally made.
The team contacted Daniels faculty and staff for mentoring and guidance before the finals in New York and also used coaching services offered by DU, according to Patrick Orr, senior director of Graduate Operations at Daniels, who attended the New York competition.
Daniels was one of the 25 teams in the nation that was invited to attend the event, defeating schools such as the Leonard N. Stern School of Business (New York University), ESADE Business School, Fox School of Business (Temple University), Neeley School of Business (Texas Christian University) and Isenberg School of Business (University of Massachusetts and Notre Dame).
In the final round, Daniels faced off against the business schools of Temple University, University of Notre Dame, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Curtin University.
“Winning the Aspen Institute’s international business case competition is a positive reflection of an incredibly talented and motivated group of Daniels students, as well as a team of dedicated Daniels faculty and staff who coached and mentored the team in preparation for this rigorous case competition,” said Orr.
The team of students also received an additional $1,000 to donate to the charity of their choice, Living City Block. The project is a Denver nonprofit which works to “prove the case for making our cities radically more resource efficient, one block at a time,” according to their ITS website.
“We believe that their [Living City Block] goal of trying to find financially viable mechanisms to achieve aggressive gains in energy efficiency and distributed renewable generation for small- and medium-sized building owners is an important intersection between business and society,” said Reger, who helped develop a second version of the program in Brooklyn, New York.
The first round of the Aspen Institute’s 2012 Business & Society International MBA Case Competition saw Daniels competing against 25 teams with over 1,000 students. The field was then narrowed down to five teams that would compete in New York City.
The case for the competition centered around Wal-Mart de MCB)xico and CentroamCB)rica. Teams were asked to consider future renewable energy projects and investments for the company in Mexico, while at the same time addressing potential environmental and societal impacts. Students also assessed the Wal-Mart policy that requires sustainability projects to meet the same investment criteria as other projects. The case was written by Jaan Elias, director of case-study research at Yale.
“Wal-Mart’s growing energy demand can be met through sole off-taker power purchase agreements (PPAs) with renewable developers,” said Knox. “Financial institutions are then free to lend to the developers thanks to the dependable cash flows Wal-Mart has guaranteed.”
In 2011, Beyond Grey Pinstripes, an independent survey conducted by the Aspen Institute, ranked Daniels No.2 in the world for small MBA programs and No. 15 in the world overall for integrating social and environmental issues into its MBA program.
Daniels has competed in the Aspen Institute’s Business & Society International MBA Case Competition every year since the competition’s inception in 2010, but this is the first time a team has reached the finals.
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