This past week, the 35th annual John Molson MBA International Case Competition (MBAICC) took place. It’s the largest and oldest case competition of its kind in the world. 36 teams of MBA students from across the globe competed, and McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business placed 5th overall.
The competition was hosted by Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business and was held in Montréal. It’s a student-organized competition that provides an exciting and challenging opportunity for MBA students from around the world to test their skills, intuition, and stamina in an intensive weeklong case competition.
The MBAICC is the Olympics of case competitions. Only the 36 top MBA schools from 19 different countries and six continents are invited. There were over 270 judges from renowned businesses, 400 volunteers, and over 25 sponsors who made the event possible.
The competition format was a round-robin tournament consisting of seven unpublished business cases. With three hours to prepare, teams of four students analyzed and evaluated the cases with no access to the internet and presented a final PowerPoint presentation. Teams were judged on creativity, insight, substance, and plausibility of implementation.
The DeGroote School MBA team had a very strong performance. They won three cases and split the panel on their remaining two cases. They finished with the highest points in their division and fifth overall in the competition. They were close to entering the semi-final round as the only team representing Ontario.
Although they did not make it to the final round, in a recent press release by the University, it was revealed that they received accolades from the judging panel of senior business leaders. The judges said that they had, “among the best presentations that the panel has seen to date.”
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf won the Concordia Cup and $10,000. The runner up was the Asper School of Business from the University of Manitoba. To learn more about the competition, visit the website.