An outstanding team of Queensland University of Technology business students recently added a US title to a QUT winning streak, when they competed against 29 other universities to take first place in the prestigious Marshall Business School International Case Competition at University of Southern California.
The team's members - Ben Dunphy, Rob Foley, Erin Gregor and Luke O'Shea - are part of the QUT Business School 16-member case competition squad.
The latest win tops off six months in which QUT teams have taken first place in case competitions in Thailand, Singapore, and Canada.
For their latest triumph, the QUT team competed against top universities in the US, Thailand, Denmark, Germany, Canada and New Zealand, and faced judges from organisations including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Google, Warner Bros Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Boeing, Ernst & Young, and Marshall Business School.
The QUT team presented a strong business strategy and a practical solution for the major players in entertainment, including Warner Bros Entertainment, Sony Corporation, LG, and Microsoft, to meet changing consumer demand for content, particularly on digital devices.
The solution presented by the QUT team addressed issues including online piracy of film and television content, declining DVD sales, and capitalised on new systems such as cloud-based digital lockers for individual virtual libraries.
QUT Business School international director Andrew Paltridge said the QUT students competing in case competitions gained a strong competitive edge in the business world, which had seen some team members land summer internships and graduate roles with international management consultancies AT Kearney and McKinsey.
"Apart from being talented and highly motivated students, our teams often have the edge with solutions to business cases that combine big picture strategy with practical, real-world tactics in a compelling presentation," Mr Paltridge said.
"They build on the skills and knowledge from the business degree at QUT, by putting in a lot of hard work and practice at weekly, extracurricular, three-hour workshops and regular weekend boot camps to fine tune their skills in research, analysis, problem-solving and business presentations.
"Students involved in case competitions are mentored by academic advisors, and work with their peers, including alumni from previous case competitions who coach them so they can learn from their experience."
Student Erin Gregor, the team member focused on the marketing aspects of the case at Marshall Business School International Case Competition, said teams were given 24 hours to analyse the detailed written case study containing financial and environmental data.
They could use the internet for additional research, but could not contact anyone outside the team or access any password protected material, such as databases.
"Our solution was to create a separate online distribution model, similar to iTunes, run by the major production companies using their existing platform called Ultraviolet. The other part of the solution was to do away with staggering movie releases across countries, which leaves a window for piracy, and make the movies available online around the time they are released in cinemas.
"Our research showed that people are prepared to pay for the far better quality they would receive on Ultraviolet and it would also solve their ethical dilemma as we found that people are generally a bit uneasy about piracy."
In this most recent competition, the QUT Business School team competed against some of the best business schools in the world including: the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania; Sauder Business School from the University of British Columbia; Copenhagen Business School; the University of Maastricht School of Business and Economics; and the National University of Singapore. In the past six months, QUT Business School case competition teams have achieved exceptional results:
- Queen's University Intercollegiate Business Case Competition, Canada - 1st place in Business Policy, 2nd place in Human Resources - QUT was the first winning team from outside Canada in the competition's 34-year history
- Thammasat Undergraduate Business Challenge, Thailand - 1st place (tied)
- Nanyang Technological University Asian Business Case Competition, Singapore - 1st place
- National University of Singapore DBS International Case Competition - 2nd place
- University of Auckland Champions Trophy , New Zealand - 3rd place competing against winning teams from international case competitions across 2011.
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Media contact: Niki Widdowson, QUT media officer, 07 3138 1841 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au
