IESE MBAs Win in Consulting Case Competition

A team of MBA students from IESE Business School has won a case competition held on the school's home turf in Barcelona.

The IESE Roland Berger International MBA Case Competition is an annual affair and seeks to simulate the realities of pursuing a post-MBA career in consulting. It prides itself on attracting talented students from business schools around the world to come together and learn from each other while engaging in a battle for first place.

In this - the 21st edition of the case competition - automotive multinational, Gestamp, provided the source of the consulting challenge set before MBA teams representing seven different institutions, including Tuck School of Business and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Each institution selected their own team of MBAs to travel to Spain for the competition. At CEIBS, this process went back to November of last year, when 10 teams - roughly 20% of the school's entire MBA cohort - competed internally for the chance to represent the school.

Final sees IESE Business School square up to London Business School 

The action was spread over three days and saw the IESE Business School team emerge as finalists from a semi-final stage in which they were pitted against teams from HKUST and the Kellogg School. The IESE team then went on to defeat London Business School in the final, at the discretion of judges which included the CEO of Gestamp itself, Francisco Riberas, as well as partners at Roland Berger.

As well as sponsoring and helping to judge the case competition, Roland Berger also lent the MBAs some coaching advice from their roster of consultants about how best to put forward their ideas and recommendations to the CEO of the company in question here. No surprise, then, that one of the winning IESE Business School team members, Matthew Miller, expressed his delight in being able to “to get a taste of what it’s like to work as a consultant.”

Competitions like these allow students to work together in applying newly acquired theoretical knowledge to a real-life setting and can be a particularly useful experience for anyone looking to use the MBA to change careers and enter, in this case, the consulting industry.

Indeed, one MBA student at Tuck Business School and former banker, James Goff, who participated in last year's edition, was looking to do just that and described the IESE Business School case competition, as well as a similar event held at Singapore's NUS Business School, as "two of the most formative and definitive experiences I’ll have during my MBA."