Faculty of Management

Overview

Traditionally, business cases have focused on past events or scenarios. Once students conduct an in-depth analysis and offer clever solutions, the whole experience represents an intellectual exercise.

What if it could be different?

Focus

Our case competitions let you analyze current, real-world, business experiences — and to offer working solutions — to businesses within our community.

How it works

Case competitions are structured most commonly as a high-pressure team dynamic approach to mimic real-life business situations. Students are given a set time period in which to review, analyze, prepare and submit a presentation for judging.

Depending on the competition, students may present their cases “live” and interact with the judging panel. Typically, the panel will “test” the presenters to determine whether they are confident in their conclusions. Some competitions allow students to travel to other areas of Canada to compete.

Winners tend to be those who are able to say, “Here is the issue; here are the alternatives to solve the issues, this is the one we chose, this is the criteria we came up with. We weighted it according to this criteria; in the end this was the best decision. I know this might sound like a risk, but if we go back to our foundation and analysis, this is how we came to this conclusion.”

Of course it also has to make intuitive sense, and you’ll learn to recognize when additional inquiries need to be made. It’s about learning to approach problems through systematic analyses. Students remark about how often they begin to employ similar strategies in other courses.