Kogod MBAs Team Compete for Clinton Global Initiative-Backed Hult Prize
The 2014 Hult Prize President’s Challenge, a sustainable enterprise competition with a $1M prize backed by the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), has challenged a team of five first-year Kogod School of Business MBA to answer one question: “Can we build a social healthcare enterprise that serves the needs of 35 million slum dwellers suffering from chronic diseases by 2019?”
Kesang Chungyalpa, Nicolás Delvasto, both MBA ’15, Harrison Wagenseil, Erin Davis, both MA/MBA ’15, and Kate Large, JD/MBA ’15, don’t know that answer quite yet but they’re confident that they’ll be prepared once they travel to Boston in March and compete in the semi-final regional against 300 other highly-qulaifed teams.“Everything in my life right now finds its way back to healthcare,” said Delvasto. “It’s like I see a new potential solution everywhere I look, and I can’t wait to bring that back to the team.”
The team schedules meetings twice a week and the five are constantly in contact throughout the day via email threads and chat lines. In addition, Delvasto and Chungyalpa have been connecting with friends and colleagues in their native Colombia and India, respectively.
If the team wins their regional pool in March, they would secure a spot at Hult’s incubator for social enterprise in New York City and the chance to pitch their solution at the annual meeting of the CGI to President Clinton himself. With that said, their sights are still aimed dead at March.
“Just getting this far has been a huge accomplishment and we have so much more to get done before we head to Boston,” said Chungyalpa. “We’re taking this challenge very seriously and we really want to represent Kogod and AU well.”
