NEWTON, Mass. – A team made up of four current and former Mount Ida College student-athletes excelled in the classroom on a global level this month, earning recognition for their work in a business strategy simulation competition as part of their capstone projects.
McKeon, Miller, Bowen, and Batakis, who called themselves BioPix, were benchmarked against not just their fellow students, but across 2,800 teams from 160 colleges worldwide, and they tied for first place in four of the ten weeks.
BioPix also finished the last year of the competition tied for first place in their overall Game-to-Date score, and earned Top 100 rankings in Earnings Per Share, Return on Equity, and Stock Price.
The result earned them an invitation to compete in the Best in Strategy Invitational, where McKeon will be representing the group, in addition to recognition on the winner's plaque in the School of Business, certificates and gift cards.
Using a PC-simulator called GLO-BUS, the students were charged to run a digital camera company that produces and markets entry-level and upscale, multi-featured cameras in head-to-head competition against companies run by other members of the class and around the country. The companies compete in a global market arena, selling to camera retailers in four geographic regions—Europe-Africa, North America, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.
Each of their decisions at each point throughout the simulation could affect the overall earnings, the stock price, the brand image for the rest of the years.
After a semester of meeting, debating, making tough decisions and running hundreds of simulations, the teams presented their findings to their fellow students, faculty, and administration, including Mount Ida president Barry Brown.
This was the first year that the Business program at Mount Ida had run this capstone simulation in the graduate school, and according to professor Scott Burke, all four teams really stepped up to the challenge.