A team of graduate students from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business won the first-place prize of $25,000 in The Grand Business Challenge in Digital Health last Friday.
The two-day competition brought teams of graduate students from business institutions in the United States to showcase their ideas on how information technology could influence digital health care.
“We are very pleased with the outstanding performance by our students across all programs in various case competitions taking place at other universities, and now with the first-place finish of our team at the Grand Business Challenge,” said Questrom Dean Kenneth Freeman.
The team, composed of Dalia Rinaldi, Jillian Luu, John Long and Catherine Skulnik, had to answer a four-part prompt posed by the competition’s sponsor, Merck and Co., an American pharmaceutical company.
The four parts included visualizing the health care ecosystem in the year 2025 as a set of interconnected data graphs, thinking about which companies are best employed, understanding what Merck should do in regard to the different data graphs and determining which companies Merck will need to gain.
The idea that set BU’s team apart from the other 11 schools in the competition, Skulnik said, was that Merck should adopt patient-centric care to lead it into a series of acquisitions and partnerships. Skulnik said building in-house machines will promote Merck’s brand as well as increase their revenue.
There was a 17-hour work period in which the team worked overnight in Questrom — where the challenge took place — to prepare a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation and a 15-minute question-and-answer session, team members said.
“We all really trusted each other,” said Rinaldi, which she noted was very important given the stressful time crunch. “We could opt out when we needed to get some rest, and we all knew when to politely shut each other up.”
Because there are internal case competitions within Questrom to decide which members will continue to represent BU, the team members were some of the most qualified to partake in the challenge.
“No matter how hard a team works there’s never any guarantee that it will do well,” Questrom lecturer Gregory Stoller wrote in an email. “So, while I will never take any honor for granted, given this team’s work ethic and smarts, I’m not at all surprised at their success.”
The team’s strategic presentation earned them the first-place prize in the Grand Business Challenge for the first time 14 years, Stoller said.
“It’s important to mention that our students’ success is very much a team effort,” Stoller wrote. “There are lots of people at Questrom and across the University, both at the faculty and staff levels, who are helping our teams prepare and succeed.”
The team had support from the BU team that made it into the finals in last year’s challenge.
“Last year and this year were the only two times BU had made it into the finals, but this is the first win, and I think getting mentorship from last year’s finalists really helped us,” Rinaldi said. “There’s a lot of personal pride for us in this win as representatives of BU.”
Questrom receives recognition and the trophy for the team’s win, but the $25,000 grand prize is divided among the four team members.
“I got really lucky to compete on the team,” said Luu, who was recruited to the team after another member could not participate for external reasons. “Personally, the money was a really big incentive for me in the competition. I’m planning a wedding, so all of the money is going toward that.”
Although the members of this team are graduating in the spring and effectively retiring from case competitions, future Questrom graduate students now have a standard to which they can aspire to meet.
“I’m excited, and proud, of our students given the breadth of success they have had over the past few years,” Stoller said. “Either at the undergraduate, or graduate, levels and across diverse industries, BU students continue to demonstrate how much value they can add in analytics, presentation quality and business model understanding.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated that the team won first place for BU for the first time in five years. The article has been updated, as it is in fact the first time in 14 years.
