VCU Brandcenter students win international competition

January 28, 2012
By Louis Llovio / Richmond Times-Dispatch

A group of first-year students from VCU Brandcenter won the top prize in an international business competition.

The four-person team from Virginia Commonwealth University's graduate level advertising school beat out more than 100 teams from prestigious universities including Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth and The Wharton School.

The annual Innovation Challenge partners graduate students with major corporations. The students must come up with a product or solution that "addresses our most pressing business and social innovation challenges."

As the winners, the students split $20,000 in prize money and get the title of "The World's Most Innovative MBA Team."

"I'm overwhelmed by how far we've come," said Jennifer Clinehens, the team leader on the project. The other Brandcenter students on the team were Ryan Dowling, Cody Pate and Katlyn Williams.

The winning entry was a cloud-based app for AT&T that makes it more affordable for small-business owners to operate their companies.

Clouds are remote servers used to store, process and manage data.

"We didn't just stop with the app," Clinehens said. "It's an entire community that's based around small businesses and their needs and how they can use the cloud to really enable their business as they never could before, either because of financial limitations or tech limitations."

Major details could not be shared because the technology is proprietary.

Clinehens said the team came up with the idea by interviewing small business owners.

"In the end it really wound up being a passion product for us," she said.

The teams worked in three divisions, each sponsored by a company, and advanced through the process by winning each round.

The two finalists were teams from Chapman University in California working for General Electric and from the University of Pennsylvania's The Wharton School working for Syngenta.

Two other Brandcenter teams made the semifinals.

Don Just, a Brandcenter professor and the student's adviser, said he was impressed that his students, who just completed their first semester, competed against high-level masters in business administration candidates. "It's a real feather in their cap to go this far in their first year."

Just said he found it interesting that the title of "The Worlds Most Innovative MBA Team" went to non-MBA students.

"This is a credit to the school and its mission and to the work these students did," Just said.

The students were told of their first place finish Friday afternoon at a luncheon in New York. The Brandcenter students, and the other finalists, rang the closing bell at New York Stock Exchange.

"This is a really talented bunch," Just said.

Copyright Richmond Times-Dispatch. Used by permission.

Back to News & Articles