• SMU was the only Asian business school among 10 business schools globally that participated
• Inaugural Challenge sponsored by Merck held in USA’s North Carolina State University
• Rigorous case competition on real-world business challenges regarding IT security in the life sciences industry

A team of MBA students from the Singapore Management University (SMU) has clinched third prize in the NC State Grand Business Challenge held from 3-5 November 2016 at North Carolina (NC) State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. The case competition was focused on IT Security and sponsored by global healthcare company Merck.

SMU Team InnoVantage MBA postgraduate students Aravind Gopinath, Issac Tan, Lin Kuoyi, and Rohit Dewan (Team Leader) walked away with a prize of US$4000, after three days of rigorous competition. The SMU team entered the finals on 5 November to emerge third behind the teams from Rutgers Business School and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Their winning proposal was to focus on the weakest link “people” among the three pillars of organisation – people, process and technology. The team targeted on “people” to plan a cyber-attack and then later identified various methods to defend against the attacks.

SMU was the only Asian business school among the 10 participating business schools. It pitted against Boston University, Clemson University, Duke University, Florida State University, NC State University, Rutgers University, Texas Christian University, University of Economics Prague, and University of Georgia.

The students were tasked to solve a series of three real-world business challenges regarding IT security in the life sciences industry. Merck developed a set of case challenges to tackle the business side of these obstacles and the invited 10 business schools to each put forward its best four-person team to showcase its perspective on these challenges.

The NC State Grand Business Challenge introduced MBA students to the highly competitive pharmaceutical industry and presented an opportunity for them to gain exposure and insight into real-world business challenges, while evaluating how they react under pressure.

The panel of judges from the healthcare, technology, security and government sectors observed and judged the student teams to gain a new outlook on how the company should think about challenges and innovation management. The judges hailed from Merck, National Security Agency (NSA), Cisco, Intel, EY and Exsostar.

The teams were judged on creativity, methods, impact, Q&A and overall delivery.

The NSA judge commented that SMU’s Team InnoVantage was highly polished and ready for any C-Level meeting, while the Cisco judge said the slides were so well done that he wanted to hire the team right away. Merck’s judge remarked that the presentation was very logical and easy to follow, and that the slides were very well designed and showed in-depth knowledge of the subject. 

As a precursor to the NC Grand Challenge, another SMU postgraduate team had clinched third prize in the inaugural Singapore Grand Challenge focused on digital health and held by Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) Global Innovation Hub on 14-16 April 2016 in Singapore. The SMU multi-disciplinary team did well enough for the University to be invited to participate in the NC State Grand Business Challenge.

[Featured Photo: The winning SMU team (left four) were MBA students (left to right) Aravind Gopinath, Lin Kuoyi, Issac Tan and Rohit Dewan (Team Leader). (Photo credit: NC State Grand Business Challenge/NC State Jenkins MBA)]