GMAC MET Fund Blog

i2i Challenge, Second Place: James Falbe, “Using ‘Big Ideas’ to solve big problems”

For Jim Falbe, taking the GMAT led to more than graduate management education. Jim was one of thousands of recent GMAT test takers who received an email inviting them to take part in the Ideas to Innovation Challenge.

“As I am currently applying to business schools,” he said, “I looked at the contest as a type of scholarship opportunity and went for it.” Jim is currently in Jordan, consulting on projects for nonprofit and for-profits organizations and teaching classes in his community.

Jim won one of four $25,000 prizes with his idea: Using “Big Ideas” to solve big problems. The “Big Ideas” in Jim’s submission reach outside traditional business principles to incorporate different disciplines, such as psychology, history, and math. “The excellent manager,” Jim wrote, “needs to be able to identify a cause, whether it be sociological, physical, or even managerial, and then have the tools to know where to turn to address the problem.”

“Large nuggets of problem-solving gold lie on the ground just on the other side of the academic fence,” he said.

Jim sees the implementation of his idea as a semester- or year-long program embedded in existing curriculum. The program would immerse graduate business students in the major problem-solving models from other disciplines with help from guest lecturers. Incorporating an outside consulting problem would help students apply their multidisciplinary training to a real business issue.

Multidisciplinary thinking has appealed to Jim since his undergraduate days. Reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a collection of written speeches of Charles Munger, helped focus his approach for this challenge. “Following the motto of the famous mathematician Carl Jacobi, ‘Invert, always invert,’ Munger not only points out the advantages of multi-disciplinary thinking for business, but also the pitfalls of not thinking this way,” Jim said.

“Multidisciplinary thinking isn’t just for the few,” he added, “but needs to be a part of how we educate the management talent of tomorrow.”

Read more about Jim’s idea on gmac.com.

Profiles of the other second-place winners will appear here over the next few days—check back to find out more!

i2i Challenge, Second Place: Chukuwama Nze, “The Hub Network”

Chukuwama (Chukky) Nze has been interested in business intelligence and cloud computing since his dad bought him a computer, long before the concepts were household terms.

“Increasing amounts of computing power and data storage are nothing,” Chukky said, “if new and innovative ways to access and analyze data cannot be applied to create solutions that make our lives better.”

Chukky’s idea, The Hub Network: How GMAC Can Get Ahead of the Business Incubator Trend, could vastly expand the reach and the impact of the b-school cohort and group project norms. Chukky’s Hub Network idea would take collaboration to a global level, allowing graduate management students from countless schools to connect and work on projects based on their interests. Projects for this Hub Network could come from schools, businesses (or Business Incubators), or individuals and would take advantage of networking technology already in place.

The news about the GMAC MET Fund i2i Challenge reached Chukky at Loyola Marymount University, where he’s pursuing his MBA. “I was putting a team together for a different competition when the Dean of my department sent me an email informing me of the Ideas to Innovation Challenge. She thought I’d be interested,” he said. She was right.

“A lot of competitions are designed to keep the participants focused on a particular pertinent problem, locked in to a particular style of thought, and/or constrained by a limited set of resources,” he said. “The GMAC challenge is more open than most. It only ask[ed] for the idea. I am an entrepreneur as well as a student so that type of simplicity really called to me.”

Global collaboration and entrepreneurship are the foundation of not only Chukky’s idea, but his career. Originally from Nigeria, Chukky earned a BSc degree in economics and built a career in database and development solutions. He founded NotaryTools.net in 2004 and continues to lead a team of programmers based around the world.

“Much of my career has been focused on this principle, he said. “Applying it to the idea I chose for the challenge was a natural outgrowth.”

Read more about Chukky’s idea on gmac.com.

Profiles of the other second-place winners will appear here over the next few days—check back to find out more!

i2i Challenge Winners List

First Place

Contextualizing Graduate Management Education: Creating New Degrees Using Stackable Knowledge Units

Using stackable educational units and certificates can create customized and unique graduate management education.

Alice Stewart
NC A&T State
336-334-7656 x4008
Acstewa1@ncat.edu

Dr. Alice C. Stewart (PhD, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) is an associate professor of Strategic Management in the School of Business and Economics at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Prior to joining NCA&TSU, Dr. Stewart was the director of strategic analysis and planning at The Ohio State University, where she was also an assistant professor of strategy in the Fisher College of Business. Dr. Stewart’s research on strategic planning in higher education, top management teams, organizational learning, and frontline leadership training has appeared in the Journal of International Business, Management Learning, Journal of Business Venturing, the Journal of Small Business Strategy, and the Decision Science Institute Journal for Innovative Education. 

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Second Place

The Hub Network: How GMAC Can Get Ahead of the Business Incubator Trend

GMAC can address this by creating a web application restricted to students interested in entrepreneurship.  

Chukwuma Nze
Loyola Marymount University
cjunze@gmail.com

Chukky Nze has a decade of development and database experience. He founded NotaryTools.net in 2004, where he created a successful business model using a cloud-based, database-driven application. Nze holds a BsC in economics from the University of Nigeria and is working on his MBA at Loyola Marymount University, where he is studying entrepreneurial organizations and information and decision sciences.

Using “Big Ideas” to Solve Big Problems

Only by training today’s managers in the “Big Ideas” will they be able to treat both the symptoms and causes of tomorrow’s big problems.  

James Falbe
International Service Partners
jim.falbe@thepartnerscenter.com
facebook.com/jim.falbe
twitter.com/jim_falbe

Jim Falbe is an interim team leader for humanitarian agency International Service Partners, where he does consulting work for both non- and for-profit companies and projects on the ground in Zarqua, Jordan. Falbe holds a master’s degree from Baylor University and is currently applying to graduate business school. 

Every Student Creates a Business Plan

Every student writes a fully detailed business plan to improve something in the business or the world.  

Dawn Iacobucci
Vanderbilt University
dawn.iacobucci@owen.vanderbilt.edu
Faculty Profile

Dawn Iacobucci is the E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Marketing at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, where she also served as senior associate dean. Previously, Iacobucci was professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. She has published in a variety of journals, including the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, Harvard Business Review, and others; Iacobucci has also served as editor on several journals. Her research focuses on the modeling of dyadic interactions and social networks, the conceptualization and measurement of customer satisfaction and service quality, and multivariate and methodological research questions. Iacobucci is author of Marketing Management and Mediation Analysis and coauthor of Marketing Research.

A Whole New World of Opportunity: Collaboration in the Virtual World

A graduate management virtual world education community to promote collaboration.  

Alex Howland
Alliant International University
ahowland@alliant.edu

Ronald S. Rembisz (not pictured)
Alliant International University
ron@rembisz.com

Alex Howland is an intern consultant with Rembisz & Associates in San Diego, California, where he researches and facilitates leadership coaching and assists in developing assessment centers. He holds an MS—and is working toward a PhD—in consulting psychology from Alliant International University.

Ron Rembisz, PhD, has worked for the past 30 years as a full-time consultant and executive coach to corporate management. His primary professional focus has been on organizational and leadership effectiveness. He has assisted organizations and leaders in assessing where they are today, where they need to be in the future, and how to get there effectively and efficiently.

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Third Place

Management Research Platform (MRP)

Create a platform for global dissemination of management research with collaborative features. 

Sanjith Yeruva
University of Wisconsin-Madison
ysanjith@gmail.com

Sanjith Yeruva holds a master’s degree in life sciences from Devi Ahilya University, India. He pursued his research career in Virchow Biotech Company, India; Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea; and University of North Dakota. Currently, he is working as a research specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Working on innovative contests is his favorite pastime. Over the past three years, he has won multiple contests in innocentive.com and Atizo.com and reached the finalist level in the Wipro-Knowledge@Wharton Innovation Tournament, the Cisco I-prize contest, the GE ecomagination, and the Myprize contests in past year.

World Issues Focus on Integrity Innovation (WIFII)

By bringing business leaders, faculty, and students together, WIFII will make integrity a core foundation of innovative success.  

Mariana Lebron
Syracuse University
mjlebron@syr.edu

Mariana Lebron is completing her PhD in Management, with a major in strategy and minor in organizational behavior, at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on how the power dynamics between CEOs and boards of directors affect the strategic decisions that leaders make and how companies perform, including their ability to innovate and diversify, and manage the sensitivity around executive pay-for-performance compensation. She has presented nationally on strategic leadership, organizational change management, and positive social change for colleges, universities, and professional associations. Her speaking credits include the Academy of Management, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), and the American College Personnel Association (ACPA). Mariana previously worked as a higher education administrator and oversaw the development of new departments, leadership courses, academic-student affairs partnerships, and university-community partnerships. She is the founder and owner of Soul Vision, which provides educational services to organizations in the areas of leadership development and strategic change management. Mariana was one of 11,500 individuals selected from the 210,000 nominated nationally to carry the Olympic Torch for the 2002 Olympic Games as it made its way to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Alternate Reality Training for Management Education: A Third Way to Teach Management

Unite thousands of current and aspiring business students in a real-life scenario that plays out over the course of an academic year or longer.  

Ethan Mollick
Wharton School of Business
Website: http://www.startupinnovation.org/

Ethan Mollick researches the factors that lead to success in entrepreneurship and innovation, with an emphasis on the way individuals shape companies and industries. Some of his work has focused on the video game industry, and he has a book (with David Edery) on video games and business called Changing the Game. Mollick has also done research on subjects ranging from communities of hackers to the Department of Defense.

Leading in a Civilian Context

An MBA course for veterans that leverages service experience, speeds time to degree completion, and provides community and reentry support. 

M. Kendall Fitch
Harvard University
mfitch@mba2012.hbs.edu

Kendall Fitch is a joint MBA/master’s in public policy candidate and Rubenstein Fellow at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. At Harvard, Fitch was selected by faculty as course assistant and published case writer for Government Budgeting course. She manages and distributes the $10K Harbus Foundation grant package and directed the Social Enterprise Conference pitch competition for $12K in grant awards. Previously, Fitch was a senior consultant at Bain & Company.

Practical Entrepreneurship Education for MBA Candidates

Create a real-world, cross-functional entrepreneurship program that fosters practicality and immerses students in an environment that breeds innovation and future success.  

Patrick Cheung
MaRS
patrick.cheung87@gmail.com

Patrick Cheung is an associate in advisory service at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Previously, he worked as a business analyst at Berkeley Payment Solutions. Cheung holds an HBA from the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business.

Moving Towards a New Admission Process

Increase diversity in the classroom and, in turn, business globally through an innovative selection method.  

Orsolya Szabo
HEC Paris
orsolya.oszabo@gmail.com

Orsolya Szabo is head of research at the Budapest office of Egon Zehnder International, where she has worked since 2006. Prior to that, she was the Budapest Region manager for the Ipsos Group. Szabo is a PhD candidate at University of Debrecen, where she also earned a master’s in work and organizational psychology and one in English-Hungarian technical translation. Szabo is currently working on her MBA at through HEC Paris.

Cloud Business Networking

Create a platform in which the management education community can converge, share, and exchange ideas to drive innovation.  

Pritesh Sikchi
Green Quotient
pritesh.sikchi@yahoo.co.in

Pritesh Sikchi is founder and director of Green Quotient, which specializes in carbon and renewable energy advising for public and private entities. He is also a research associate at World Institute of Sustainable Energy and a core member of the organizing committee of WindPowerIndia 2011, first held in 2006 and now the largest wind power symposia in India. Sikchi holds a B.E. Mechanical from the University of Pune’s Vishwakarma Institute of Technology.

SME Partnership MBA Program

Create a unique MBA program that meets the ambitions of entrepreneurs in domestic economies by solving the challenges that face Small and Medium Enterprises.  

Yousef Al-Tamimi
German Jordanian University
yousef_tamimi@hotmail.com

Yousef Al-Tamimi is marketing and sales professional with global environment experience who specializes in proposal development, contract management, customer acquisition, project management, competitiveness analysis, market intelligence, risk management and mitigation, account management, and business development.

Practical Challenge for Social Good

Through practical projects, students will execute real-life problem solving and planning, and put their leadership and teamwork abilities to the test.  

Sisi Zhou
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
zhu.sisi@gmail.com

Sisi Zhu received her bachelor’s of science in biological engineering from MIT and currently works as a senior consultant at Rosetta, an interactive agency in New York. Although her background is in biology, for the past two years Zhu has specialized in developing marketing strategies and consumer segmentations for healthcare and consumer products, including clients such as Novartis, Shire, J&J, and Microsoft. She intends to pursue an MBA in the next few years and hopes to put it to use bringing about positive change.

Externship, Preparing for the Telecom Age

Develop a cross-university exercise that enables students to better understand and experience the limitations and differences telecommuting creates.  

Aadel Al-Jadda
University of Rochester

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Honorable Mention

Build 60 International Graduate Management Education Programs in Less Developed Regions in 5 Years

Increase access for underrepresented populations, bolster local academic prosperity, and increase global communications.  

Richard Zhou
China-CEIBS
zjiazhen.m09@ceibs.edu

Richard Zhou is working on his MBA at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). At present, he is at London Business as an exchange student in human resources. Before returning to school, Zhou was operations manager for Wang & Li Asia Resources. In 2004, Zhou earned his bachelor’s degree in management information systems at Donghua University.

Professionalizing the MBA through Service to Others

Provide a structure to enable MBA students to serve others by teaching business to underrepresented urban student populations.  

Erich Dierdorff
DePaul University
edierdor@depaul.edu

Erich Dierdorff is the 2010 Gus Economos Distinguished Teaching Award winner and assistant professor of management in DePaul University’s College of Commerce, where he teaches at the graduate and undergraduate level. Prior to coming to DePaul, Dierdorff was an instructor North Carolina State University. He is widely published and has conducted five grant-funded research projects since 2005.

Communication and Information Technology: What else is there?

Students who excel in using information technology will be great leaders because they demonstrate the ability to learn and change.  

Lauren Hanat
Lehigh University

Lauren Hanat graduated from Lehigh University in May of 2010 with a BA in journalism and classics with a concentration in Latin. She is currently in the MS Accounting and Information Analysis program at Lehigh University and will be graduating in the spring of 2012. Hanat aspires to work as an auditor at a public accounting firm in New York City.

Crowdsourced Open Consulting from the Classroom

By using an innocentive-like model, companies large and small would be able to offer up potential student projects to MBA teams in a central repository. 

Wade Eyerly
Defense Intelligence Agency
wade.eyerly@gmail.com

Wade Eyerly is a policy lead in a government agency, where he is a subject matter expert on human intelligence collection. Prior to that, he worked in campaigns and media interaction. Eyerly holds a master’s in public policy and a certificate in global management from Brigham Young University; he is currently applying to business schools.

Physical and Intellectual Growth: The Augeo Project

Proctored students will teach certificate programs in their local communities that propagate workforce earning power and increase enrollment for business schools around the globe.  

Price Paramore
Oklahoma State University/US Air Force
price.paramore@gmail.com

Price Paramore is a husband, a father, and an officer in the United States Air Force. Paramore hails from Allen, Texas, and went to college at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. While attending school he took a two-year sabbatical to serve a church mission in Siberia, Russia. After graduation, he accepted an Air Force career as a hospital administrator. Currently, Paramore works as a medical group practice manager at Incirlik Air Base in Adana, Turkey, and is a MBA student at Oklahoma State University.

i2i Challenge Winner: Alice Stewart, “Stackable Knowledge Units”

“Nothing like this has ever happened to me before!” she said.

Dr. Alice Stewart, associate professor at North Carolina A & T State University and first-place winner in the GMAC MET Fund’s Ideas to Innovation Challenge, had already been thinking about how to look at management education differently when her dean told her about the contest. Alice teaches strategic management NC A&T, which offers a master’s of science in management but doesn’t have an MBA program. As part of the UNC system, where other nearby schools already offer an MBA, NC A&T is investigating the value their programs could add to the traditional management degree.

Alice’s collaborative idea, Contextualizing Graduate Management Education: Creating New Degrees Using Stackable Knowledge Units, expands upon a concept used now in executive education—combining technological or specialized expertise with managerial specialization. Graduate management students could combine courses to build an educational plan that fits their career interests, meets the needs of the job market, and leverages proven, effective instruction across disciplines.

These “stackable education units,” Alice wrote, would be approved to stand alone and deliver “discrete knowledge chunks.” Students could build a meaningful, practical graduate management degree across universities, state systems, or consortia, much as they can now transfer classes that meet agreed-upon criteria.

Alice’s idea was inspired by the feedback she’s heard from corporate recruiters, who find that managers sometimes lack the right level of technical knowledge and that engineers could use more business basics. Her idea considers the needs of particular industries—a combination of knowledge blocks or units might better serve industry-specific business models.

Although Alice is on the faculty side and loves teaching, she also enjoys the administrative side of higher education and really valued the five years she spent as director of strategic planning at The Ohio State University. “I enjoy administration because I teach strategy,” she said. “Higher education is my own personal industry—I can’t just ignore it.”

Her administrative experience made Alice particularly excited about the Ideas to Innovation Challenge because she knows just how difficult it can be to initiate change on a grand scale. “Pushing the edge of the envelope happens more at the individual level,” she noted—right now, there’s no venue in place yet for big-idea, institutional-level innovation.

“GMAC opened this can of worms,” she said, “and I can’t wait to see what ideas have come out of it.”  

Profiles of the four second-place winners will appear here over the next few days—check back to find out more!

GMAC Awards US$260,000 in Prizes to Winners of Ideas to Innovation Challenge

Please join us in a celebrating what we believe is a watershed moment in graduate management education. Earlier today, GMAC awarded a total of $260,000 in prize money to the top 20 winners who had participated in the Ideas to Innovation (i2i) Challenge.

More than 650 individuals (and teams of five or fewer) from over 60 countries answered the question, “What one idea would improve graduate management education?”

The first prize of US$50,000 is going to Alice Stewart, PhD, an associate professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in the United States. Stewart won the i2i Challenge with her idea to allow management education students to use “stackable knowledge units” to craft customized degree programs closely aligned with today’s information-based economy.

Four other ideas are receiving prizes of US$25,000 each, 10 will take home US$10,000 apiece, and another five are earning US$2,500 honorable mention citations. These proposals include requiring business school students to translate classroom concepts into full-fledged business plans; developing an Internet-based video repository for research; and exposing MBA candidates to mandatory entrepreneurship training.

Find out more about all the winning entries at www.gmac.com/i2iwinners. To read more about the winners, view the i2i Challenge Winners List and watch this space for profiles about the top five challenge winners.

Predictions and winners

As one year closes and another begins, it’s a fairly common practice to see pundits and subject matter experts reflect back on the year past and make predictions for the one ahead. Graduate management education has had its own share of such predictions with Poets & Quants’ founder John A. Byrne writing What’s in Store for B-Schools in 2011 and Veritas Prep writing Six Predictions for 2011, among others. In some ways, this process of reflection and prediction is a natural thought process many of us do. Curiosity abounds in looking at the current environment, dynamic factors, and how things are changing in a given area. It seems there is a natural curiosity around change, dynamics, trends and innovation.

GMAC has embraced innovation as a core element of navigating the years ahead in the graduate management education field by designing, funding, and leading the challenge to answer the question: What one idea would improve graduate management education? Over 650 individuals (and teams of five or fewer people) from more than 60 countries responded to the Challenge, and tomorrow, Wednesday, January 19 at 2 pm ET, we’ll be announcing the winners on gmac.com.

Although we don’t know what exactly will unfold in 2011, we do believe that as a community of professionals dedicated to improving GME, the excitement, ideas, and creativity coming from the Ideas to Innovation Challenge will make 2011 one filled with more conversation and actionable projects around improving graduate management education, not just in our home countries and schools, but across the globe.

Truly, a global Challenge

When GMAC’s Ideas to Innovation Challenge was initially designed, GMAC MET Fund Director Allen Brandt stated his intention to receive 50 percent of the submissions from outside the U.S.

It was a pretty lofty goal.

Statistically, this goal would seem very do-able—there are more people living outside the US than inside. But achieving such a goal is something that can be neither forced nor controlled. We couldn’t make people want to participate. But the GMAC team went forward, intent on getting 50 percent or more of the i2i submissions from beyond the US border.

We wrote press releases and announcements in English, Spanish, French, and German. We set up a Sina.com site with the Challenge’s submission requirements in Mandarin. The global team of GMAC representatives, leaders, and customers went to work communicating news of the Challenge to their schools, communities, and colleagues. And social media tools were used to take news of the Ideas to Innovation Challenge even further.

We’ve crunched the numbers, analyzed the data, and assessed the demographics. Ladies and gentlemen, we are delighted to share the news that we reached our lofty goal. In fact, of the 650+ submissions received, slightly more than 50 percent of the submissions came from outside the US, with India, China, the UK, Canada and United Arab Emirates in the top countries for number of ideas submitted.

Stay tuned—we’re announcing the winning ideas on Wednesday, January 19!

Winners announced next week

Curious to know who won the GMAC’s Ideas to Innovation Challenge? On January 19, stay tuned to your favorite international business news source to find out. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in total prize money will be awarded to the winners who best answered the question: What one idea would improve graduate management education?

The Challenge, which launched in July 2010 and closed October 8, 2010, was open to participants worldwide. Over 600 individuals (and teams of five or fewer people) sent in their best ideas. Here’s what’s on the table:

• 1 $50,000 first-place prize
• 4 $25,000 second-place prizes
• 10 $10,000 third-place prizes

…plus worldwide attention from the graduate management education and business communities.

Behind the scenes, our team has been hard at work since the Challenge closed. We had to confirm that the ideas submitted were, indeed, legitimate and complete. We lined up the final list of top-class reviewers and make sure they understood the process and requirements for scoring the entries. We created a “blind” judging system to make sure none of the judges would be swayed by recognizing a person or school. And we had to crunch the numbers to make sure all contestants were given a fair shake regardless of which set of reviewers scored their idea (if you’ve ever had a professor who rarely gave anyone an A, you know what we mean).

We’re really excited to bring to the graduate management education community—and business leaders far and wide—the results of GMAC’s Ideas to Innovation Challenge. We hope you’ll tune in next Wednesday and join us as we congratulate the winners.

The I2I Challenge is now closed

GMAC’s Ideas to Innovation Challenge is now closed for submissions. People across the world were offered the opportunity to answer this question: “What one thing would make graduate management education better?” And they did. More than 600 submissions were received from people in over 60 countries. All of them offering their perspective on how to make graduate management education better, and each aiming to win their portion from the $250,000 in total prize money available.

Now that the Challenge is closed, the judging process will begin. GMAC has lined up a stellar team of judges from the business world—winners will be announced in December. A total of 14 prizes will be awarded: 1 - US$50,000 first-place prize, 3 - US$25,000 second-place prizes, and 10 - US$10,000 third-place prizes.

Stay tuned for news of our winners. In the meantime, if you’re not yet following us on Twitter or Facebook, please consider doing so.

If you submitted an idea as part of the I2I Challenge, best of luck to you!

Countdown to the I2I Challenge close

You’ve heard about it, read about it, and probably have even given it some thought over these past few months. But now is the time to transition from “thinking about it” to taking action. Yes, GMAC’s Ideas to Innovation challenge closes this week on October 8. The submitted ideas will be processed through a layered system of qualification and judging with the winning ideas announced in December.

There’s US$250,000 in total prize money on the table, but you need to get your idea submitted on time and inside the challenge rules and regulations to qualify for the chance to win your share of the prize money.

Don’t delay. Submit your idea today!