This weekend, Penn students competed in a 24-hour case competition at the Wharton School’s fourth annual Ideathon.
The Sept. 18-19 event — sponsored by the Cadillac Formula 1 Team and Professional Women’s Hockey League — asked participants to develop strategies for tackling two different business challenges. The Baker Retailing Center hosted the event, which culminated with student teams pitching their solution to a panel of judges for $30,000 in cash prizes.
Baker Retailing Center Academic Director and Wharton professor Jagmohan Raju described Ideathon as a “win-win for everyone” because it allows students to “form bonds” with each other, “engage in a real-world case problem, and help the companies do a better job at what they’re doing.”
The Ideathon welcomes participants across undergraduate and graduate divisions at Penn, with teams composed of five to six students each. Of the 18 teams involved, only four walked out with a prize.
The center is Wharton’s hub for the advancement of education and research on retail and similar business domains.
Raju explained that the Ideathon works to promote research-based knowledge creation by giving students an opportunity to tackle industry problems and learn from experienced mentors. He added that this year’s “sports angle” possessed “unique challenges” for teams because Cadillac F1 and professional women’s hockey are both “new ventures.”
“We have a sense of what the students might like,” Raju said. “It has to be challenging for students, has to be useful for the companies that are sponsoring, and that output that the students generate will be actually used so that we all feel good about what we have done.”
The competition required a $50 registration fee — which includes full-event access, custom merchandise, food, drinks, and activities. The judging panel was composed of executives from the sponsoring companies and Penn faculty members. For both challenges, the first-place winner received $10,000 and the second-place winner received $5,000.
RELATED:
Wharton club hosts annual high school business competition in Korea
Team of Penn first years win $15,000 engineering prize for best emerging technology
In their assignment to students, the Cadillac F1 Team asked students to recommend an implementable plan for building a strong United States F1 fanbase by considering the question: “why are you a fan of anything?”
Wharton and Engineering first-year Kelly Zhang said that her team saw this as an opportunity to get more involved with F1 activities, as they are all interested in the sport, adding that their knowledge of the sport assisted them in the challenge.
“Because we’re all fans, we know what the fanbase thinks so that’s how we approached it,” she explained. “We aren’t going so much into the technical side of the cars, but more so using our own experience to determine how future F1 fans might think.”
The PWHL representatives tasked students with creating a “multi-channel content campaign” that would attract viewers.
Since PWHL is a “new league,” College and Wharton first-year Adhith Theyver and his team wanted to approach the challenge as “an early-stage startup” to determine how to scale the league’s viewership up through marketing and strategy optimizations.
His teammate, Wharton first-year Aiden Jojo, said that speaking with people in similar industries helped his team “come up with some unique strategies” related to “incentive-based social media ideas.”
Ideathon participants sign up individually and build teams upon arrival. Many teams were composed of students who did not know each other prior to the event.
Wharton first-year Lourde Woods’ team — which finished first in the Cadillac F1 challenge — consisted of both undergraduate students from various years and MBA students. He said that the events offered the opportunity to connect with individuals that he “probably never would have interacted with naturally.”
“Coming here solo, I was really scared that I wouldn’t be able to find a group or find people to talk to,” he added. “But, the amazing staff here connected me with a group of students that have been here for much longer than me.”
College junior Weifan Zhang shared that the Ideathon helped his team develop many skills that they will take advantage of in the future.
“I think we all came in with individual skills, and we all came in through this with the framework of being a dreamer — not a businessman or a consultant,” he said. “We were all dreamers, and in the end, it came out perfect.”
