UW News

April 17, 2003

Korean students trump competition in Global Business Challenge

A quartet of undergraduate business students from South Korea proved they knew beans about Starbucks’ strategy for international expansion and took home top honors last weekend in the Business School’s fifth annual Global Business Challenge.

The foursome faced robust competition from 13 other universities who traveled from around the world to demonstrate to a panel of corporate judges how the company could successfully expand into Brazil despite potentially damaging anti-globalization sentiments expressed by critics and activists in South America. No small feat to accomplish within a 48-hour timeframe.

Peter Maslen, president of Starbucks Coffee International and one of the competition’s 26 judges, commended all participating teams for their ability to research and analyze the given problem and offer strategic and professional presentations, particularly within such a tight turnaround time and without much shut-eye.

While it’s not unusual for the competitors to spend those two days relying on little or no sleep, the students and faculty involved behind the scenes of the GBC also consume their fair share of caffeine and agonize about every detail.

Business 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 will dissect and analyze typically takes several months.

“It’s important that the case question be multi-regional 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.”

Competitors this year hailed from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Taiwan, plus two from the United States — the University of California, Berkeley and the UW.

The winning team represented Seoul National University. Rounding out the final four schools were Emory University, Universidad de los Andes of Colombia and Mexico’s Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) University.

“The two co-chairs, Tracy DeVany and Margaret Xu, have impressed everyone with their foresight, sense of humor and their ability to work through difficult issues,” said Kirsten Aoyama, director of the Global Business Center. “This flagship event is completely orchestrated by students who learn by doing, and each year the GBC’s many volunteers and competitors say it’s a memorable experience they will carry with them and build on in their professional careers.”

At Saturday’s awards banquet, DeVany fought back tears when describing how personal an experience it had been for her and how appreciative she was of the more than 80 UW students and faculty who worked around the clock to ensure the competitors’ needs were met.

Before getting down to business, the three- and four-member student teams spent a week in Seattle, touring. But then they swithced to work mode, spending the next two days doing extensive research and analysis on the effects of anti-American sentiment or “push-back” that Starbucks might receive upon opening its flagship store in Ipanema, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. They further had to weigh the financial risks Starbucks might consequently encounter and make recommendations on how the company could minimize and avoid these threats.

Maslen said the case study of the Brazilian store was not unlike the scenario company executives dealt with when it established a store in the Forbidden City in Beijing, China in 1999. He welcomed the chance to take all presentations back to company headquarters and mull over students’ suggestions for future market entry into sensitive cultural and geographical areas such as Brazil.

As the evening came to a close, Dean Yash Gupta congratulated all participants and reminded them of the qualities that make this competition stand apart from other business case competitions. “This contest requires entrants to apply their entrepreneurial and technology-savvy skills while developing solutions to an authentic business problem of international scope,” said Gupta.

The Global Business Challenge is produced and supported by the school’s Global Business Center and students in the Certificate of International Studies in Business (CISB) program.