MBA Students Square off in Annual Smith Technology Challenge Case Competition

April 25, 2008 marked the final round of the annual Smith Technology Challenge Case Competition at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. The competition is designed to refine and develop the strategic thinking and analytical skills of second-year, part-time MBA students. Participation in this event is an academic requirement and began in March with a Sprint conference call and culminated with final team presentations at Van Munching Hall in College Park.

A Sprint business case was selected and kept secret from all students and judges until the beginning of the event. Faculty, corporate friends and alumni were invited to serve as judges. With over 40 original teams, only three advanced to the final round. The first-place team, Team TFO, received $5,000 cash prize ($1,000 per student) for the win. Team TFO members were: Jessica Barton, Gayle Bowerman, Bill Podurgiel, Patrick Small, and Brian Weaver.

Final round judges included Atish Gude, senior vice president of Mobile Broadband Operations in Sprint Nextel’s new 4G Mobile Broadband business unit; Ben Brooks, MBA/MS ’04, director of strategy and business development at NII Holdings, Inc.; and Bob Krapfel, PhD, academic director of MBA programs at Smith and associate professor of marketing.

Krapfel said that the final decision was unanimous, though the second-place team had a great presentation and held interest of the audience with humor and their strong personalities. Team TFO won because "they had a better analysis that reflected a deeper understanding of the technical and marketplace issues, which translated into more realistic recommendations," explained Krapfel.

"Our team has worked together throughout our time at Smith and that familiarity was key to our success," said Gayle Bowerman. "With just over a week to prepare for the final round that camaraderie helped us pull the whole shebang together by capitalizing on each other's strengths to present a quality analysis of the case. We learned a lot and I found the whole experience to be very rewarding."

The second-place team -- Alison Cherry, Michael Louis, Russell Morton, and Sara Reedand --received a $300 gift per student. The third-place team -- John Aspinall, Kyle Cooke, Jeff Kong, Sindhu Meda, and Patrick Winemille -- received a $200 gift per student.

Special thanks to final round judges and Smith School faculty for reviewing the student papers prior to the presentation round: Gary Bulmash, Barney Corwin, Mike Finch, Curt Grimm, Robert Krapfel, Sunil Mithas, Wendy Moe, Charley Olson, Nagpurnanand Prabhala, Joyce Russell, and Janet Wagner.

Congratulations to all part-time MBA students who participated in the event!

- Alissa Arford-Leyl, Office of Marketing Communications