The following article was originally sourced from “A Win for Innovation” on Kellogg’s News & Events page.
Five Part-Time MBA students at the Kellogg School of Management found time to not only successfully maneuver full-time jobs and their studies, but also take home the “Most Innovative Solution” award and $2,500 prize in a prominent case competition.
Phillip Besoiu, Eugene Chang, Albert Rhee, Javier Perez and Eric Cheng were awarded Most Innovative at the International Case Competition at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh. The competition challenged participants to create an overseas expansion plan for Eaton Corporation’s low-voltage air circuit breakers.
“We all each brought our own niche skills to the case competition,” said Besoiu. “I think that’s what helped us win that award.”
The Kellogg students’ plan called for data-collecting software that would notify the users of outages before they happen. The team’s case also shows that the necessary technology is out there but has not been applied in the capacity their project suggested.
“We called it a failure-predicting software,” Besoiu said. “It could provide some kind of cost savings for the end user if they could see an outage coming before it arrives.”
Albert Rhea said the case competition gave him valuable experience presenting to executives, not the engineers he’s used to and wants his fellow part-time students to see that case competitions are doable, even with full-time jobs.
“You don’t get a lot of opportunity to give present to executives, director level people from other companies,” Rhee said. “For me, it was really an opportunity to practice having executive presence.”