GLENDALE, — A team of graduate students from Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies took first place at Thunderbird School of Global Management's sustainable innovation competition.
The ten teams in the final round had to develop innovative and sustainable business concept plans to handle real-life challenges faced by Johnson & Johnson and Arizona Public Service.
The John Hopkins team won $20,000 and earned the title "Global Champions of Sustainable Innovation" at the end of the Nov. 8-10 event held in conjunction with Thunderbird's first Sustainable Innovation Summit.
An MBA team from Thunderbird’s On Demand program won second place and $5,000; a team from Thunderbird's Global MBA for Latin American Managers took third and $3,000.
The other finalist teams included a second team from Johns Hopkins and teams from Duke, University of California Davis, Purdue University, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, University of Rochester and University of Maryland. The competition had started with more than 100 teams representing 51 universities in 13 countries.
In the final round, teams had to formulate ways for Johnson & Johnson to cater to the medical needs of diabetic patients in China and for Arizona Public Service to create opportunities to utilize business process improvement and make sustainability a core business value.
At last year’s competition, a team of MBA students from Instituto de Empresa in Madrid took home the first-place prize for their solution to make high-tech health care affordable in developing countries. An MBA team from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University won the second prize, and a graduate team from Johns Hopkins University won third.
At this year’s Summit, Thunderbird also announced the winner of its campus greening challenge, which asked students for ways to shrink the school’s climate footprint. Projects had to pay for themselves and contribute to the educational goals of the school. The school will use the winning idea, Zero Capital Solar Pub, which was submitted by Ben Korsmo, Youngkuk Lim, Hiroshi Tojo, Kathy Yue and Chris Larkin. The team received $1,000.
The project includes installing solar panels on the campus to generate enough solar power and renewable energy to offset the amount of electricity consumption at Thunderbird's Pub. A power provider will own, install, operate and maintain the solar panels. Thunderbird will purchase solar power generated from the panels at a fixed rate, saving almost $5,000 the first year, and the initiative will neutralize nearly all of the Pub’s emissions.
Thunderbird was founded in 1946 as the first graduate management school focused exclusively on global business and has operations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Russia and Asia.
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