Triple podium finish for Beedie undergrads at ICBC case competition

The Beedie School of Business ICBC team took home gold in the Human Resources category and silver in both Marketing and Accounting.

Three teams of undergraduate students from the Beedie School of Business have earned podium places at the prestigious Inter Collegiate Business Competition (ICBC), Canada’s oldest and longest running business case competition.

The competition, held from January 15 to 17 and hosted by Queen’s University, Ontario, welcomes over 100 students from top business schools from across the globe to compete in eight different events: Accounting, Debating, Finance, Marketing, Business Policy, Ethics, Human Resources, and Management of Information Systems.

Beedie students Natalie Botteselle and Kelly Yang, under the supervision of Beedie Associate Professor and team coach Peter Tingling, took home the gold medal in the Human Resources category,

Both the Accounting team, consisting of Alice Tao and Jenny Mi and coached by Beedie senior lecturer Anne MacDonald, and the Marketing team of Jocelyn Tan and Antony Sulentic, coached by Beedie lecturer Rui Basto da Silva, netted silver medals.

“We spent countless hours preparing for the competition, training with past cases and researching different topics with our coach and individually,” says Human Resources team member Natalie Botteselle. “Placing in the finals is a huge accomplishment, but just representing Beedie on an international stage – the moment we had trained for all semester – was an amazing experience.”

Competing teams at ICBC must qualify from a preliminary round where they are tasked with analyzing a complex business case and devising a viable solution for it.

The top six teams in each category qualify for the Final Weekend, where they are given five and a half hours to prepare and present a case written by top industry professionals pertaining to real world events.

“Case competitions such as ICBC are a highly competitive environment that require our students to use all of their cognitive, analytic, and presentation skills to create a real-world capable solution to a problem,” says Casey Dorin, Executive Director of Undergraduate Programs at the Beedie School of Business. “It is extremely rewarding to see our students compete against top tier universities from around the world and emerge victorious.”

For more information on ICBC, visit http://comsoc.queensu.ca/icbc/

For information on case competition participation at the Beedie School of Business, visit https://beedie.sfu.ca/dashboard/student-engagement/case-comp