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CEMS Students win top Award

Date: 19 Jul 2010

Pictured l-r at the awards - Karel Vanacker, Tineke Franssen, Kai Hermsen

Dublin, Friday, 16th July 2010: A team from the CEMS Masters in International Management at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School has won the prestigious Schneider Electric Award for their ‘SC Tree’ solar change project at the Shanghai Expo 2010 Awards. This major international competition, organised by HEC Paris and Tsinghua SEM Beijing, received over 300 projects from business school teams from around the globe. Four out of the five winning teams represented CEMS academic members.

CEMS is a strategic alliance of 27 member schools from four continents and over 50 prestigious corporate partners. The CEMS Master in International Management Programme, which is offered exclusively in Ireland at UCD Smurfit School, was ranked as the No. 1 Master in Management in the world by the Financial Times in 2009.

The team from UCD Smurfit School, which is the only Irish member of the CEMS alliance, won the award for their ‘SC Tree’ project, which was designed to enable slum inhabitants to become entrepreneurs by providing them with an ecological, technological and social business model that would make their environment more sustainable and a better place to live. The Shanghai Expo 2010 awarded the students with a €3,600 cash prize, an all-expenses three-night stay in Shanghai (including access to the World Expo) and mentoring with representatives of leading international companies.

Celebrating their win the team, Kai Hermsen, Tineke Franssen and Karel Vanacker, jointly said, “We all have different backgrounds and nationalities, share the affinity for entrepreneurship and saw this competition as a unique opportunity to combine our skills in order to create a sustainable venture for megacities. We enjoyed the process leading to our final business proposal very much because it was an outstanding chance to learn a lot about the challenges of megacities and to become creative in finding problems to solive these.”

“UCD Smurfit School is proud to be part of the CEMS alliance and to be Ireland’s only university to offer the world’s no. 1 Master in Management programme,” said Prof Tom Begley, Dean, UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. “We congratulate the winning team on their fantastic achievement and their success is testimony of the quality and calibre of students this prestigious programme attracts.”

Further information on the competition visit shanghai2010award.com or for more information on the CEMS MIM programme visit smurfitschool.ie