Three cheers for Heavener’s case competition winners

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Four students from the Heavener School of Business won the Champions Trophy Case Competition at the University of Auckland Business School in New Zealand on Jan. 31.

This win marks the third international case competition the Heavener School has won this academic year, and the second consecutive competition it has won. The Heavener School won the Thammasat Undergraduate Business Challenge in Bangkok, Thailand in August 2014, and the Australian Undergraduate Business Case Competition in Brisbane, Australia in December 2014.

The team’s participants were Joseph Couture, Melissa Morlan, Samantha Pace and Harrison Tool. Their team won the final after placing first in all three preliminary rounds.

Queensland University of Technology placed second; National University of Singapore placed third; and the University of Pennsylvania placed fourth.

The Heavener School competed against 11 other schools from six countries including Hong Kong, Australia, the Netherlands, Thailand, Singapore and Canada. The Heavener School and the Wharton School from the University of Pennsylvania were the only U.S. teams in the competition.

The competition is designed to push teams to help solve the challenges faced by businesses and not-for-profit organizations. The competition’s three cases involved providing recommendations for a technology company involved in fitness, New Zealand’s largest distributor of electricity and gas, and a charitable organization dedicated to providing more accessible media to New Zealand’s vision- and hearing-impaired community.

The Heavener School’s next international case competition will be the John Molson Undergraduate Case Competition Feb. 22 to March 1 at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business in Montreal, Quebec.