UW-Madison Business Students Take 1st Place In International Competition
A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison business students has won
first place and $20,000 in an international business plan competition in
Singapore.
Kelly Bruner, Dominic Foscato and Brad Krutsch comprised the Wisconsin
team--one of six teams that made the finals in the Lee Kuan Yew
Global
Business Plan Competition held at Singapore Management University on
June 13. Jay Ebben, a PhD student in management and human resources,
accompanied the students as their advisor.
The Wisconsin team won for their presentation on
Imago Scientific
Instruments, a Madison, Wis. company that is developing technology for
the semiconductor and other industries that employ nanotechnology.
Imago's product is a Local Electrode Atom Probe (LEAP) microscope,
originated from research performed by Dr. Thomas Kelly and his staff at
the Materials Science department of the UW-Madison's College of
Engineering. Amy Gribb, an MBA student, is supervisor of the student
team.
The competition is the first-ever international business plan
competition to be organized at the undergraduate level, targeting
students from universities, colleges and polytechnics internationally.
The only other U.S. team to make the finals was Purdue. Other schools in
the finals were the University of Manitoba, Canada; Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore; Institut Teknologi Bandung,
Indonesia; and a joint effort of the National University of Singapore,
Singapore & University of Wollongong, Australia.
To enter the competition, teams submitted business plans that included
product information, an assessment of the competition, and financial
projections. After the original submissions, the field was narrowed down
from over 200 to the six finalists.
"We are pleased to see our student teams do so well in international
business plan competition," said Interim Dean,
R.D. Nair. "This is the
latest in a series of strong showings by UW-Madison business student
teams. These competitions are becoming an increasingly valuable part of
the learning process here. They offer students a rich experience and
help them students acquire skills they will be able to use in the
business world."
In early June, students from the business school took top honors in
national case competition sponsored by the Consortium for Graduate Study
and another School of Business team took first place in a
venture
capital investment competition in Austin, Texas.
Kelly Bruner is from Boscobel, Wis., and is majoring in Information
Systems and Management. Dominic Foscato, of Richfield, Wis., is majoring
in Management and Marketing. Brad Krutsch, Washburn, Wis., is in the
business school s five-year Accounting Program.