The MBA Student Association (MBASA) at Telfer School of Management came up with an event that is the first of its kind – a small and medium-sized (SME) Consult-a-thon focusing on providing fast-paced, strategic solutions to businesses in the local community.
Revisiting Case Competitions Framework
Developing the Right Challenge
Due to the pervasive pandemic, today's SME enterprises confront some very genuine and severe issues that require innovative solutions. To be successful, both businesses and students require assistance and direction from local business community supporters.
With many local businesses showing interest in being part of the Consult-a-thon, the MBASA organizing team had to interact with each of the business owners to understand the cases better. Following a thorough brief, the team collaborated closely with the business owners and members of the MBASA’s executive team to co-create case documents that showed extensive, accurate, and up-to-date market information.
Intensive Case-Cracking
The Consult-a-thon included 4 teams composed of 4 students that would come to know of the businesses and the cases only during the event. The team then had to work on the cases provided by each participating business at different time during the event.
At the end their presentations, the panelists will provide feedback on the teams' presentations and insights on how to implement their ideas better.
For its first edition, the Telfer MBA students had the chance to work with dynamic local start-ups such as:
- Shyne Eyewear, a small Ottawa social enterprise run by Enactus uOttawa which manufactures and sells sunglasses and blue-light glasses created from 100% recycled materials;
- Ekidna Sensing, a biotech startup located in Ottawa that builds technology solutions for the legal Cannabis industry;
- Empower'em is a grassroots social enterprise focused on providing a community and support to women of colour in order to help them develop their leadership skills, build confidence and achieve their personal and professional goals.
All in for local businesses
Since it was not a traditional case competition, the panellists evaluated the ideas qualitatively, not quantitatively. The rubric focused on the clarity of identification and articulation of challenges, level of thorough analysis, creativity and feasibility to provide feedback, and recommendations to the participants.
A Successful Event
The event also got praises from the principal beneficiaries. “We needed a strategic direction and these presentations provided us with new creative ideas on how to tackle this problem. The recommendations the students provided were actionable and we are happy and excited about the entire event,” said Alexander Parsan, Project Manager at Shyne Eyewear, and Telfer BCom Accounting student.
Nicolas Boileau, CEO of Ekidna Sensing, also appreciated the outside expert view that the Telfer MBA students brought in. He looks forward to the next 6 months to one year to see where the company will move towards with the new ideas and strategy he collected over the weekend.
The committee is already planning the next edition of the event, which will take place in 2022 in a much bigger scale with even more local organizations. Any local businesses and students from all horizons with an interest in being part of this incredible initiative are invited to contact the MBA Student Association to discuss possible participation in next year’s competition via