Senior William Nedds has given numerous presentations during his time as a business major, but none with as much riding on it as the one he was about to give for his Senior Capstone Strategy course. As he stood ready to present with his teammates to a CEO and three executives from a Boston-based mobile technology company three things occurred to him.
“It was pretty intense knowing that not only was a grade in the course on the line, but so was the case competition, and a potential job with a tech company,” says Nedds, whose winning team received rave reviews from the panel. “Because so much was riding on it we took it very seriously, which made it feel like a real-world situation.”
That boardroom feel was exactly the atmosphere Assistant Professor Allison Kingsley was hoping to simulate when she created the case competition four years ago as part of her capstone course, which is the culmination of students' business education. For the assignment, 10 teams of students presented a strategic analysis of Boston-based company Motus to its CEO Craig Powell, a VP of marketing, a talent manager, and analyst Lexie Reed '13, the UVM alumna who won Kingsley's competition in 2013 and helped create this year's collaboration with Motus.
“It's designed to be a mix of business theory and strategic conundrums applied to cutting edge technology start-ups,” says Kingsley, who takes the winning team to dinner in Burlington at the restaurant of their choice. “We analyze a real business at a real inflection point in its lifecycle, and the students aimed to answer a real strategy question for the real executive team. Motus is not an easy business to understand, so the students were challenged to get out of their comfort zones; and the live format and high stakes competition really pushed the students to deliver more than typical.”
The collaboration is also mutually beneficial: while students gain valuable presentation experience and potential job opportunities, Motus hears new ideas that could benefit its company.
Students offer cutting-edge solutions to interested CEO
Teams presented strategy recommendations with predictions on future products and projected revenues and profitability. Proposals ranged from new partnerships with companies like Enterprise Rent-A-Car for mileage reimbursement to a hotspot partnership with wireless Internet startup Karma to facilitate Motus’ core products as well as an expansion into device reimbursement. Some teams advocated for Motus to jump into new spaces such as the growing regulatory-driven trucking telematics industry or the scheduling industry, while others built on Motus’ existing core success in mobile reimbursement technologies and other mobile workforce management solutions.
Having worked for more than a decade in international finance specializing in emerging markets, Kingsley says she wants to ensure that students connect their education with the wide range of employment demands. “I integrate the different business disciplines like finance, marketing and analytics to help students apply those tools to real-world cases,” she says.
Nedds and his teammates, including Rehana Pothiawala who was among three students to land job interviews with Motus following the competition, encouraged Motus to take advantage of a new "bring your own device" law in California that requires companies to reimburse employees for all business calls made with their personal mobile device. They proposed that Motus adopt its existing platform to work with a local one so employees in California could use their own device for work at a reduced cost to both the employer and the employee.
“We also recommended that Motus open an office in California,” says Nedds, whose team accurately predicted the cost of opening an office in California, which Motus was planning on doing unbeknownst to students. “It’s pretty exciting to know that a company like Motus is at least considering your ideas.”
Former case competition winner reason for Motus collaboration
“The entire genesis of this project was Lexie,” says Kingsley, who helped place Reed at an investment firm out of college before she moved to Motus in 2015.
“The BSAD 191 case competition was the apogee of my senior year,” says Reed, who was an undergraduate research assistant for Kingsley. “It challenged my problem-solving skills and allowed me to demonstrate what the business school had taught me. Being able to sit on the other side of the table provided me the opportunity to help expose students to today’s dynamic business environment and encourage them to step outside of their comfort zones. Our goal in participating was to foster some of the motivational benefits of competition and simulate a real world, collaborative experience. We were so impressed with the final presentations. The students truly demonstrated their mastery of advanced business principles.”