A team of MBA students from the Marshall School of Business took first place at the annual General Electric Southwest Regional Case Competition. This year’s competition was held Nov. 14, at Popovich Hall.
GE makes it a point to enable personal growth by challenging future leaders early in their careers. The Case Competition is no exception. The judges for the competition arrive with deep commercial and strategic knowledge of the case. They challenge the case teams with similar rigor as GE executives challenge their employees.
The Case Competition demonstrates to MBA candidates the importance of values core to GE, such as clear thinking, delivering results in an uncertain world and creating commercial strategies to win in our global markets.
This year’s Marshall team was made up of first-year MBAs Ryan Kuo, Milind Gupta,Ying Tao and Dev Shah. The case focused on the topic: “How can GE establish its position as the cross-industry innovation leader in a world of brilliant machines?”
The students spent the first week of the competition brainstorming ideas for the topic and the second week preparing and practicing their presentation. The team did research on trends, issues and opportunities in healthcare and wind turbine industries.
The team had help with their research and planning from two second-year MBAs, Vic Thompson and Jenny Dare Paulin. The two coached the team on everything from the veracity of their research to the effectiveness of their PowerPoint presentation.
The students each won $1,000 and also won a guaranteed first-round interview for GE’s prestigious Experienced Commercial Leadership Program (ELCP) summer internships. ELCP is GE’s flagship global development program for MBAs.