MBA Students Win Emerging Markets Case Competition

A team of Georgetown McDonough MBA students won first place at the Corning Emerging Markets Case Competition, which took place at Cornell University on November 10. The team — Simon Persico (MBA’19), Kartik Vadlapatla (MBA’18), Georgia Loftis (MBA’20), and Nikhil Issar (MBA’19) — proposed solutions for how the American satellite industry can remain competitive with its Chinese counterpart.

The case competition, which was part of the 7th Annual Emerging Markets Institute Conference, tasked students with preparing a strategy to compete with a state-backed Chinese satellite company in emerging markets. According to Vadlapatla, the most difficult part was “preparing the strategy for a fictitious company. We had to rely mostly on case data and research existing defense contractors for our analyses.”

The competition emphasized the importance of collaboration. “The highlight of the competition was when our team reached consensus on the strategy we planned on recommending. It felt so energizing knowing that we were all proud of and intellectually invested in our proposal,” Persico said.

For Vadlapatla, the biggest lesson was hearing from everyone on the team. “Get everyone to participate and contribute his or her ideas,” he said. “That made the whole problem-solving experience so much more enjoyable.