By Yvonne Murphy, MBA Candidate, UCD Smurfit School

Pictured l-r: Second year Executive MBA students: Mark Finegan, Yvonne Murphy, Declan Whiteford, David McKnight, and Eimear O’Flynn.

January 22, 2024 - UCD Smurfit School sent a five-strong team to Montréal for the first in-person John Molson MBA International Case Competition since 2020.

The John Molson MBA International Case Competition is a not-for-profit event organised by a team of MBA candidates from the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. The competition is open to top business schools worldwide and is recognized as the largest case competition of its kind. Its main purpose is to bridge the gap between corporate and academic worlds, which ultimately enriches the experience for both students and executives alike.

The competition format is a round-robin tournament consisting of seven unpublished business cases. The cases are selected from among the top entries to the annual Case Writing Competition. The highlight of the week is a live case presentation by a major company facing a real-life business challenge.

UCD Smurfit School were drawn as Division B against five leading business schools from Canada, the Netherlands, India, and Germany. Over the course of the week, UCD went head-to-head with each, in a round-robin format, tackling five unpublished business cases, including a live case. Each team was allocated three hours to read a 20–30-page business case, carry out an analysis, and develop a strategy and implementation plan. The output in each instance would be a 25-minute presentation to a panel of five executive judges followed by 15 minutes of questions.

Unfortunately, the Indian team drawn for Division B was unable to travel to Montréal at short notice, a “Team Global” was mobilised in their place drawing alternates from Canadian, Swedish, German Universities, and UCD.

Cases 1 to 5 were completed in a flurry of activity, with some light relief provided by Thursday night’s movie themed fancy dress party, where UCD transformed into Toy Story and lived it up at the karaoke machine. Both UCD and Team Global ended the week with 3 wins and 2 losses each.

The final banquet dinner on Sunday night celebrated the end to an incredible week. A German university team, Münster, was presented with the Concordia Cup. Team Global was also presented with a glass trophy ‘The Richard Outcault Team Spirit Award’ in recognition of their “genuine team spirit and collaboration.”

A note from the students:

Molson has been a standout experience of the MBA experience to date. The learning, laughs and friendships forged will remain indelibly engraved in our memories as we wistfully reflect on our time at UCD Smurfit School. The team wishes to thank all those who tirelessly supported them in their preparations.

We were expertly guided throughout the week and in preparation by Professor Pat Gibbons and we would like to express our deep gratitude to Pat for his encouragement, time and expertise. We would also like to acknowledge and thank Paul Slattery - NxtGEN for his guidance on presentation skills.

The competition itself was also excellently organised and hosted by Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business and great credit and thanks is due to the organising committee who looked after us so well during the week.

To the next generation of MBAs, ‘good luck out there!’.

Go forth and seize the opportunity.