Teams of undergraduate and graduate students presented competing business strategies for rescuing the profits of Groupon, a site that offers customer discounts on various merchants' services at the first Dartmouth Case Competition at Tuck School of Business on Friday. The winning team, which included Paul Collins '12, Nathan Kanefield '12, Patrick Martin '12 and Rob Rein '12, received a prize of $1,000 and interviews with management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, which sponsored the competition.
The Thayer Consulting Club, the Graduate Student Consulting Club and Dartmouth Society for Investment and Economics helped organize the competition, according to Min Kim '14, vice president of the Dartmouth Society for Investment and Economics.
"It's the first of its kind at Dartmouth," Shikha Ghulati Th'12, a member of the Thayer Consulting Club who helped organize the event, said.
Teams of three to four students were given 33 hours to tackle Groupon's declining revenue in light of emerging online companies that offer similar services, such as Living Social, according to Kim.
The teams were selected based on a written application and members' resumes, according to Ghulati.
Ten teams five teams consisting of undergraduate students and five graduate teams were chosen from the applicant pool, according to information distributed for the competition.
In the first round, Dartmouth economics professors and Tuck professors judged 15-minute presentations delivered by students, according to Prabhjeet Attal Th'11, a member of the Thayer Consulting Club who was involved in organizing the event. Five teams were selected to move on to the second round, with two graduate, one wild-card and two undergraduate teams selected to progress based on scores from each division.
Teams that progressed to the second round were judged by consultants of the firms Axia, Interbrand and Oliver Wyman, and were invited to a networking dinner and awards ceremony after the competition, Attal said.
"It's another opportunity for those who did not make it to the final round of recruitment," Kim said. "The final interviews for Oliver Wyman would have been in Boston, so it's a big deal to bypass the process."
The idea for the competition was suggested by Vipul Borkar Th'11 who had previously competed in case competitions outside of Dartmouth and wanted to offer similar experience to undergraduates, according to Kim.
"I also applied to be a part of the Dartmouth team for the Emory Case Competition," Borkar said in an email to The Dartmouth. "I unfortunately didn't make the cut for the team, but that rejection was the tipping point. I was then motivated to create the competition for Dartmouth so others can have chance and take on the challenge of creating such an event."
Members of the winning team said that through the competition, they had the opportunity to practice the skills that a liberal arts education at Dartmouth provides.
"One of the biggest challenges was that the prompt was open-ended and ambiguous," Kanefield said. "But a Dartmouth education prepares you to think in that way."
Three members of the team enrolled in an undergraduate course at Tuck in strategic management with business administration professor Catherine Maritan. They said the class was instrumental to their success in the competition.
"The experience we gained from doing case studies was valuable throughout the whole process," Rein said.
The team was nervous going into the first round, but it pulled through under pressure, Kanefield said.
The Dartmouth Society for Investment and Economics' will likely collaborate on more events with Tuck and the Thayer School of Engineering due to the success of the competition, Kim said.
"We want to establish long-term relationships with through weekly meals with professors and students," he said.
Collins is a member of The Dartmouth Business Staff.
