Ohio State competition prompts students to put business skills to work

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Ohio State competition prompts students to put business skills to work

Fisher Invitational brought students from across country to campus

Students from across the country gathered at The Ohio State University's Columbus campus recently to participate in the annual Fisher Invitational Case Competition.

The Fisher College of Business hosted the competition with Battelle, a Columbus-based nonprofit, private company that applies science and technology to solve challenges in the environment, biology, chemistry and advanced materials.

Students worked in teams, brainstorming solutions for a business challenge facing Battelle. The week culminated in a pitching competition in which students presented their solutions to Battelle representatives.

The Fisher team came in second to the first-place winner, the Rutgers School of Business. Other teams represented the University of Cincinnati and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Working with Battelle gave the students an opportunity to solve real-world problems facing businesses and nonprofit organizations, said Brian Mittendorf, Ohio State associate dean for graduate programs and an accounting professor at Fisher.

"I always take pride when I look at the largest nonprofits in the United States and see Battelle … is always one of the largest," he said. "This is an organization that's really at the forefront of social enterprise; it's a nonprofit organization, but it runs a business operation."

The Fisher team included master of business administration (MBA) students Abhishek Kumar, Namit Mishra, Shubham Ray, Sanjay Sanapathi and Ashu Suman. Team members drew on their individual strengths to analyze the Battelle case, Suman said.

"We all come from different backgrounds," she said. "Sanjay was a finance specialist. I was doing strategy, Namit was a strategy specialist, and Abishek and Shubham were handling the operations. We divided those aspects. And then whenever there was something which the team needed brainstorming together - the broader aspect of the solution - we would come together."

The Battelle case challenged teams to devise business solutions while protecting the company's proprietary information, Sanapathi said.

The Fisher team drafted solutions by "making assumptions based on industrial benchmarks, based on brainstorming about what we think is the right assumption," he said. "Just dealing with that ambiguity was critical, and that took a lot of time."

Participating in the pitch competition helped the team members hone their presentation skills, Suman said.

"It was, personally, a really amazing experience," she said. "Standing in front of those many people and representing our idea was really good. And then getting that reciprocation from them - they actually appreciated what we were presenting. And we had two rounds, so we improvised from round one to round two. It was a good learning experience on how you can change your own speaking style based on feedback."

Tricia McHale, an Ohio State alumna who is enrolled in the University of Cincinnati's MBA program, said participating in the Fisher Invitational helped her apply business principles she learned in the classroom.

"I was excited to participate in a case competition like this because of the learning experience you get from having an unexpected and new case, and that technical knowledge that you have to learn and be able to adapt to," she said. "I think being able to answer questions and think on your feet is a major element of becoming a business leader."

Other UC team members included Jordan Bauknight, Xavier Morales and Jacob Watson.

Watson said he also appreciated the opportunity to apply his education to current business challenges.

"It's all good practice, all things that really represent the real world," he said. "They can try and replicate that as much as possible in a class, but until you're really putting it together, taking these real-world situations that a company has … with external and internal implications, then you don't really know how much you've learned and how much you've grown - or where you can continue to improve."

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