April 14, 2003
South Korea claims victory in 5th annual UW Global Business Challenge
A quartet of undergraduate business students from Seoul National University proved they knew beans about Starbucks’ strategy for international expansion and took home top honors last weekend in the University of Washington Business School’s fifth annual Global Business Challenge. The other three finalists were Emory University, Universidad de los Andes of Colombia and Mexico’s Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.
Event organizers said the foursome faced robust competition from 13 other university teams that traveled from Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the United States. Competitors had to explain to a panel of corporate judges how Starbucks could successfully expand into Brazil despite potentially damaging anti-globalization sentiments expressed by critics and activists in South America. The students had just 48 hours to prove they were more than just expert bean counters.
The visiting students arrived in Seattle April 6. After touring Seattle and area companies, student teams received the strategic business problem and had two days to decide how Starbucks could open a store in Ipanema, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, while minimizing the effects of anti-American sentiment or “push-back” it might receive from locals. They further had to weigh the financial risks the coffee giant might consequently encounter and make recommendations on how the company could overcome these threats.
The competition’s 26 judges included executives from Boeing Co., Ford Motor Co., Frank Russell Co. and Starbucks Coffee International. Teams were judged on quality, creativity and professionalism in presenting their analyses of the business problem.
Peter Maslen, president of Starbucks Coffee International and one of the competition’s judges, commended the South Korean students for their ability to research and analyze the given problem particularly within such a tight turnaround time and without much shut-eye.
The win was the first for Seoul National University. Last year’s first-place winners from Germany’s European Business School created a five-year international expansion strategy for NeoPets, an interactive virtual pet Web site.
Professor Debra Glassman, faculty director of the event and co-author of the case said the process of selecting an appropriate “real-world” example and writing the case students dissected and analyzed took several months.
“It’s important that the case question be multiregional and multifunctional,” said Glassman. “That means it has to involve numerous countries and require the students to consider a variety of business functions such as marketing, accounting and human resource management. It’s also always fun to have a local company with a familiar product and one that college students can relate to.”
The Global Business Challenge is produced and supported each spring by the school’s Global Business Center and students in the Certificate of International Studies in Business program.
Participating in this year’s Global Business Challenge were:
Swinburne University, Australia
Concordia University, Canada
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Audencia Nantes Ecole de Management, France
European Business School, Germany
Budapest University, Hungary
University of Haifa, Israel
Kobe University, Japan
Seoul National University, South Korea
Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico
National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Emory University, United States
University of California, United States
University of Washington, United States
