International Collegiate Business Strategy Competition

An Award Winning Strategy

College of Business graduate students competing in the 55th annual International Collegiate Business Strategy Competition (ICBSC)returned from Anaheim, CA with trophies for first place in Overall Performance and Best Written Documents. As part of the challenge, student teams worked to develop their own product, complete with a comprehensive business plan. This year’s team consisted of students with a diverse age range, first-generation college students and ISU’s first online student participant. The students included, (pictured left to right, front to back), Elisa Bringhurst-VanOrden, Guy Patterson, Quinton Cheney, Laurel Palmblad, James Cooper and Vanesa Fontes Nava. The team was guided by co-advisors Dawn Konicek, an accounting professor, and management professor Alex Bolinger. “[The group’s] success is a tribute to the potential, if sometimes elusive, benefits of leveraging diverse perspectives in teams,” said Bolinger. Outside of the opportunity to share multiple perspectives in their decision-making processes, the team benefitted against their competition due to sticking with their original mission and vision. The team was also able to regulate high employee retention levels in their business. Overall, this year’s competition proved to be one of the most successful yet. The ICBSC represents another unique real-world opportunity for College of Business graduate students in which ISU is the only university in the surrounding states of Idaho, Utah, Montana and Wyoming that participates in the competition, thanks to generous support from IdahoCentral Credit Union.