Tulane MBA Project wins top prize in FCG Showcase

A team of eight Freeman School MBA students that studied the current landscape of MBA education and made recommendations to the Freeman School’s MBA Task Force took home top honors and a $500 prize at the inaugural FCG Consulting Showcase.

The Freeman Consulting Group organized the event to highlight the nine projects that FCG teams worked on during the fall 2012 semester. Each team delivered a 10-minute overview of its project and recommendations and answered questions from a panel of guest judges, who were charged with picking the top project based on the team’s understanding of the client’s needs, its development of a strategic plan of action and the client’s satisfaction.

Serving as judges for the showcase were Rick Conway of JSC Management, Kristi McKinney of Deloitte, Allen Bell of Topside, Axel Freudmann of AIG and Seth Hamstead (MBA ’12) of Cleaver & Co.

The MBA Task Force is currently developing a new strategic plan for Freeman’s MBA program. As part of that effort, the task force reached out to the Freeman Consulting Group and asked a consulting team to help clarify the school’s current market position, its primary competitors in the market and the differentiation strategies being used by other programs to position themselves in the market. The team also developed recommendations and potential short and long-term strategies.

The Tulane MBA Project consulting team included Ahmed Al Massry, Dan Morrell, Timur Ivannikov, Ana Hernandez, Olga Bustamente, Jing Guo, Wei Shen, Yutong Ding and Zhu Jinghong.

In addition to the Tulane MBA project, the judges also recognized two projects as second-place winners: a project for the Mayor's Office of Cultural Economy to review and analyze the city's system for allocating Live Entertainment Tax Credits and a project for alternative drink company Be: Well to develop a channel and marketing strategy for its Iconic drink. A project for nonprofit investigative journalism organization the Lens to develop alternative means of revenue generation earned the third-place prize.