A team of four BCom students (Max Miller, Safeena Dhalla, Shizu Okusa, and Tom Dvorak) travelled 11,000 kilometers to New Zealand to bring home the gold at the 3rd Annual Champions Trophy Case Competition.

Held at the University of Auckland Business School between February 3 and February 6, the event brought together the brightest young minds in business from 12 universities on 4 continents.   The event is invitation-only, based on a university’s success in the past year at other global case competitions.

After the first round, the Sauder team faced off against the National University of Singapore (who placed second), University of Southern California (third), and the University of Hong Kong (fourth). Beside the four finalists, other competing universities included the University of Florida, Masstricht University (Netherlands), University of Navarra (Spain), Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), Singapore Management University, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), the University of Melbourne (Australia), and the host, University of Auckland.

The Sauder team also won the “People’s Choice Award,” which is determined by the votes of the case competition participants after viewing the final round of competition.

Professor Kin Lo coached the team with assistance from Sauder alumni Mark McCoy and Andrew Grieve.  Sponsors include the Commerce Undergraduate Society at the Sauder School, the UBC Alma Mater Society, and T4Bi (Templates for Business Inc.), a Vancouver-based firm specializing in the development  of business applications for deployment in data centres, cloud, or hosted environments.