Business Students Bring Home Honours From World Competition in Slovenia

Marketing Management students at Fanshawe's Lawrence Kinlin School of Business were selected as the only team with an implementable business plan at the world finals of the global business competition Challenge:Future held May 15 to 18, 2010, in Bled, Slovenia. The students have been offered substantive venture capital funding from one of the competition's main sponsors - Third Millenium Knowledge of Slovenia. The students have a few weeks to put together an implementation plan to qualify for the venture capital fund of up to $75,000 CDN.

Left to right: Mary Pierce (Chair, Lawrence Kinlin School of Business), Jeff Palmer, Eryk Gabriel and Professor Rhonda Payne

The Fanshawe team, partnered with University of Glamorgan Business School from Wales, and was the only North America team remaining out of the 1669 students, from 951 business schools, representing 134 countries who initially competed in the first round of challenges. Challenge:Future is a youth think tank that challenges students to collaborate with their peers to provide innovative and environmentally sustainable solutions to global, economic and social challenges.

"Jeff Palmer and Eryk Gabriel of Fanshawe College, and their Glamorgan University partner Jake Jones were selected as world finalists and were recognized as having the only implementable business plan in the competition," said Mary Pierce, Chair of the Lawrence Kinlin School of Business. "We are extremely proud of the innovation and business savvy demonstrated by these new graduates."

The Fanshawe-Glamorgan University team competed in the IdeeaLab Challenge with their web solution www.linkativity.ca. This challenge encouraged semi-finalists to create a virtual online "marketplace", whereby corporations, government and academic institutions could challenge youth to collaborate and make recommendations to a product or service problem. "The uniqueness of their entry was to allow students to be differentiated and connected through their skill set, rather than by their education or work history when applying to or being recruited by the challenge organization" said Rhonda Payne, the team's faculty mentor. "This global platform will be an opportunity to match corporations, government and academic institutions with the best and brightest young minds in the world."

The University of Malaysia Team was declared the overall winner of the competition and won a 20,000 Euro prize for their innovative transportation concept. Competition winners were selected based on a combination of expert judge's evaluations and community votes. The additional recognition of the venture capital plan which was offered to Fanshawe/Glamorgan was introduced at the competition as a new element to take these innovative youth business ideas forward to the marketplace.

Challenge:Future is an international not for profit organization promoting youth creativity and innovation. They are a division of CEEMAN - Central and East European Management Development Association.