Last week, two other students from my class and I participated in a case competition organized by the National University of Singapore (NUS) MBA Knowledge Management club. For this competition, the team had to work on a case study for roughly a week, and then present their findings to a jury of professors and other experts at NUS. The other participants in the case competition were groups of MBA students from various business schools in Singapore: NUS, S P Jain, Singapore Management University (SMU), and INSEAD.
The provided case was interesting: It described the UAE-based, government owned Islamic bank Al Hilal and its success story over the past two years. It did not, however, pose a concrete question but rather asked for an evaluation of their success so far and potential pitfalls for their future growth, which initially made it hard for us to decide what we should focus on.
Despite the fact that we did not win the case competition, we learned a lot in the experience. Among the lessons learnt were the following points:
- Start the analysis from the industry rather than the individual company, and include findings in presentation
- Frame the scope of the answer soon to outline a potential story
- In a strategy question like the one in this case, put an emphasis on competitive advantage and its sustainability
- Streamline the presentation: don’t reiterate, don’t include detail you don’t want to present, focus on most important aspects with rationales
In summary, the case competition has been a valuable experience, which begs for repetition to see if the lessons learnt can improve the output the next time.
