MBA students from across the world will descend on Brisbane in September to find ways to repair trust and customer value in the financial services sector as part of the 2019 Global Business Challenge (GBC).
This year’s challenge, which has a prize pool of more than $125,000, is being conducted as a partnership between QUT, The University of Queensland and Griffith University with the support of government and industry.
The 2018 challenge, which attracted entries from 134 teams and 52 universities, was won by Université Laval from Quebec. This year’s finalists will be announced in July with the finals to be held from 30 September to 3 October, 2019.
The objective of the GBC is to leverage the exceptional intellectual talent from the worlds’ top business schools and universities to solve a major global problem.
The challenge for 2019 is to ‘develop solutions to improve trust and customer value in the delivery of financial sector services’.
This year GBC has also partnered with the Silk-Road Entrepreneurship Network and the Global Research Centre at Zhejiang University to conduct a China Chapter of the competition. The winner of the chapter of Round 1 will automatically be selected as a finalist to compete in Brisbane in September 2019.
The competition is designed to challenge students to formulate business solutions for globally relevant and contemporary ‘wicked’ problems with global significance. Importantly, the GBC is designed to foster cross-border and cross-discipline collaborations to create solutions that capture emerging transformative business opportunities for industries, regions and countries.
Students enrolled in any business or technical discipline based postgraduate program are eligible (either currently enrolled or enrolled in 2018), such as MBA, Masters Degrees or other relevant post-graduate degree programs.
Solutions will consist of a combination of new and emerging technologies, as well as novel business models to support commercialisation and global adoption of these solutions. Industry prizes are specifically targeted to support finalist teams, or their collaborators in their commercialisation effort. As collaboration is a key pillar of the competition, teams are encouraged to have strong collaboration with technology providers, from research and industry and government organisations.
As the first and largest competition of its type in the world and its partners have committed to host the event for an initial seven year period. This will see the GBC has become the new benchmark in Graduate Case Competitions with a focus on delivering implementable and practical solutions to the world’s biggest challenges.
