A team of Chicago Booth MBA students came took home a $5,000 first-place prize at the 2015 Kellogg Biotech & Healthcare Case Competition at Northwestern University. In additon to the money prize, Team Evidence– made up of Dr. Jonas de Souza, Lindsay Davis, Jason Lipes, and Barry Sandall, all of whom are Booth – also came home with a launch plan that included pricing and forecasting for Amgen’s medication Evolocumab, a newer cholesterol drug under FDA consideration.
Forty teams applied to participate in this year’s Biotech & Healthcare Case Competition. Of the forty applicants, only ten teams representing eight of the country’s top business schools were selected. These teams pitched their plans and idea to a panel of judges from AbbVie, a Fortune 500 researcher and developer of biopharmaceuticals.
According to an interview Dr. Team de Souza had on the Chicago Booth website, Team Evidence used the Chicago Approach to create its winning plan.
“We strongly believe that the education we are getting at Booth helped us to challenge every single assumption we made,” said de Souza. “We should have evidence and data for each and every one of them. When we could find evidence to support an assumption, we would interview stakeholders and generate the evidence.”
Booth took home the prize on January 25, but had to beat some tough competition to do so, including second-place winner Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley and third-place finisher Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell.
Chicago Booth have had a historical success rate at these competion, finishing second in 2014, 2013, and 2009. This was Booth’s first win.
“Bringing a new pharmaceutical product to market is an enormous challenge,” said Tim Calkins, clinical professor of marketing at Kellogg and one of the directors of the case competition. “This year the teams did a remarkable job thinking through the different stakeholders and developing compelling plans.”