MBA Student Team Earns Third Place at International Competition

A team of MBA Sustainability students from the Donahue Graduate School of Business has earned third place in an international case competition sponsored by the Aspen Institute, an organization devoted to fostering worldwide values-based leadership.

The final round for the Aspen Institute’s 2013 Business & Society International MBA Case Competition, now in its fourth year, took place on April 19 in New York City.

The competition began in March, when more than 1,000 MBA students from 25 business schools worldwide submitted written solutions in internal qualifying rounds sponsored by the participating schools. The best solution from each school was submitted to the Aspen Institute for blind review, and five teams advanced to the finals.

The Duquesne team members—Matthew Ebberts, Gregory Gorse, Atalie Hayes and Andrew Minotte—are students in the MBA Sustainability program. As finalists in the competition, they traveled to New York City, where they presented and defended their proposal before a panel of executives and later attended an invitation-only reception hosted by BNY Mellon. The Duquesne team took home a $5,000 scholarship prize.

At the final round, only teams representing the Stern School of Business at New York University and the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College (City University of New York), the first and second place finishers respectively, topped Duquesne’s team.  Fourth and fifth place teams were the University of Denver and Villanova.

This year’s Aspen case competition required the team to present their plan for addressing sustainability, economic development and environmental activism challenges encountered by an international producer of palm oil. The Yale School of Management and the National University of Singapore Business School co-authored the case study problem.

All MBA Sustainability students participated in the Duquesne qualifying round of the Aspen Case competition as an extension of the program’s signature live-consulting project courses taught by Dr. Robert Sroufe, the Murrin Chair of Global Competitiveness and the Beard Institute’s director of supplied sustainability, and Diane Ramos, an adjunct instructor and associate director of graduate programs.

“Matt, Greg, Atalie and Andrew proposed a profitable, cradle-to-cradle solution for turning waste into new revenue while serving stakeholders and the environment,” said Ramos.

“Their success at leveraging sustainability for innovation demonstrates our faculty commitment as signatories of the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME),” added Sroufe.