Adcenter students thrive at international competition

By Tom Gresham

Two teams from the Virginia Commonwealth University Adcenter emerged from hundreds of student teams to place in the top 10 at the prestigious Innovation Challenge, the world’s largest academic innovation competition.

The VCU Adcenter and the Indian School of Business, which is based in Hyderabad, India, were the only schools to place more than one team in the top 10 of the competition, which featured 440 teams from 88 universities in 15 countries. Participating schools included teams of largely MBA students from such universities as Harvard, the University of Chicago, MIT, Yale, Duke and Georgetown. A team from McGill captured the event’s championship, which included a $20,000 cash prize.

The first round of the competition required participating teams to develop concept plans for solving real problems submitted by the competition’s participating corporations – DaimlerChrysler, General Electric, American Express OPEN, Whirlpool and Hilton Hotels. Ten teams were selected from the first round and invited to compete for the grand prize Nov. 16 through Nov.18 at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

In the championship round, the 10 finalists worked to solve new sets of questions from Hilton and DaimlerChrysler. The teams were judged on the quality of their presentations to both corporations.

The Adcenter teams participating in the competition were members of the Business of Advertising class for first-year students taught by Don Just, an associate professor in Creative Brand Management in the Adcenter. Each of the Adcenter teams included at least one student from each of the school’s academic tracks – Creative Brand Management, Communications Strategy, Art Direction and Copywriting. The integrated structure of the teams mirrored the makeup of teams that would confront similar problems in a real-world business environment.

Just said the Adcenter teams' strong performance demonstrated the effectiveness of the school's focus on inter-disciplinary collaboration and creative thinking to solve business problems.

"The student's showing in this important international competition demonstrates that by going beyond the traditional MBA curriculum to provide students the opportunity to work collaboratively with students from a variety of disciplines, both business and otherwise, the Adcenter is ahead of the curve in responding to the needs of today's companies who must stay out front in anticipating the needs of a rapidly evolving market environment," Just said.

Although the Adcenter’s top teams did not ultimately capture the competition’s grand prize, Luis Carranza, an Adcenter graduate student who was a member of one of the teams to reach the finals, said the competition at Darden was invaluable. In addition to the challenge of developing concept plans for Fortune 500 companies, Carranza and his classmates mingled with executives and attended presentations from well-known business experts. They also witnessed the work of their peers from some of the world’s top business schools.

“The experience was great,” Carranza wrote in his blog from the competition. “We met some really cool people. We were in a room full of executives and talented students. The winners had great ideas and presented them well. If I could do it again, I wouldn't change a thing.”

Carranza’s team also included E.B. Davis, Alexis Bass, Zoe Bell and Dele Oni. The other Adcenter team to reach the finals consisted of Elizabeth Gerhman, Nien Liu, Marcus Brown, Rodrigo De Lima and Sruti Dhulipala.