From March 1 to March 3, a brand-new business challenge took place. “Monopoly World: Roll the Dice and GO!” is the Business Club’s first large-scale event this Spring semester, and more than 40 AUBG students gathered to test their case-solving skills in a competition for the grand prize.
Continue reading the article that was originally published on the AUBG Daily website.
“Monopoly World: Roll the Dice and GO!” is, according to the Business Club’s post on Instagram: “A new event that will take you through real-world business scenarios.” Yulvie Izet, President of the Business Club, believes that this is one of the event’s main benefits. “We all know AUBG is a liberal arts college, and we are pushed to our limits to try to jump this gap between academic and real-world business.”
Sports Hall during the event. Photo courtesy of the Business Club
In the span of three days, 12 teams of students worked on a case for a real-life company, and each team had a C-level manager mentor. There are three cases and three respective companies – Lenor, Oral B, and CreateX, and four teams work on each case.
Unlike the club’s annual Marketing Communications Challenge, which focuses only on creating marketing campaigns, “Monopoly World” includes other factors crucial for every successful business.
“The Monopoly Challenge has been ripening for the past four years,” Yulvie said. “We have been trying to expand the marketing challenge and incorporate knowledge from different departments because we know that the concentration of the Business department is not only on marketing but also on finance, accounting, management and innovation, and sustainability.”
Just as “Monopoly World” put the participants’ skills to the test, the challenge for the club members was the organization. Yet, each department did its best to work in unison with the others and solve problems efficiently, as they are, according to the club’s president, “a team of ambitious and quick-thinking people with great cohesion.”
The most challenging factors were ones out of the club’s control, such as responses from the potential mentors. Yulvie shares: “We are organizing the event on a holiday weekend, so it was very hard to persuade people, and some dropped out last minute.” Still, they were able to handle it adequately thanks to the members of the Speakers department, who were persuasive and quick to suggest alternatives. “We have such a great human resource in this department with an enlarged network and many connections,” says Yulvie.
After the opening ceremony and networking with mentors, the challenge itself began at 18:30 on Friday, March 1. Each team received one of the three cases, which were all complex and required skills in different areas. Freshman Marta Gakharia, whose team, “The Iron Managers,” won first place in the Oral B case, shares that they had to create a plan for the launching of a new Oral B product on the Austrian market. The teams working on this case had to present it in a way that would persuade the market in Austria to accept it for a certain price.
Oral B first place winners. Photo Courtesy of the Business Club
For participants, the intense work was balanced out with mentors’ games and food breaks. “We created a very strict agenda to keep our plans organized. We also had strong engagement with our mentor Daniel Lydianov,” shares Marta.
The cases were all elaborate and this made the mentors a crucial part of the teams. “We had an incredible mentor who was of great help because without him we wouldn’t have understood the case,” said third-year student Victoria Taneva.
Aside from that, the cases required an impeccable distribution of work, as each task was a challenge of its own. “Our case was the Oral B one and it had a lot of numbers – ten pages of small text and numbers that were different parameters that we had to take into account. Me doing the finances, meant that I had to be on my laptop the whole time,” Victoria said.
Iren Dimitrova, a junior whose team worked on the CreateX case, said that the most difficult aspect was the scarcity of time. “We had to do a lot of things in a very short span of time and sleep was definitely sacrificed.” Despite her team being new to these types of challenges, they found the working process both entertaining and educational. “Our team was well prepared even though it was the first time that my teammates were participating in such a competition,” Iren said.
Business Club members. Photo credits: Weband
On Sunday evening, after a jury discussion, the results were announced. For each case, there were first, second, third, and fourth prize winners. The first prize was a ticket for the life-sized Monopoly game in London, which all three teams, “The Iron Managers,” “The Strategic Cannons,” and “The Ethical Dogwalkers,” will enjoy. For the other positions, there were vouchers provided by the Business Club and their sponsors.
The event was supported by HP, A1, Zlatna Ribka, Asarel Medet, and MarketStar.
For updates from the Business club, follow their Facebook page and Instagram profile.
