Professor Jon Moore and four of his students traveled to Minneapolis, Minnesota to compete in the CoMIS Case Competition for the first time. CoMIS is an international case competition, where UConn competed against 19 of the best teams in the world.

Professor Moore’s team was made up of students with a variety of backgrounds – Tyler Lauretti (Management Information Systems), Chris Connelly (Accounting), Spencer Rabin (Finance, and the alternate Sarah Burdick (Digital Media and Design). These students were chosen because they were the top four in the Business Case Competition Independent Study, conducted by Professor Moore and the Operations and Information Management (OPIM) Department.

The first day of the competition, Thursday, March 30th, all of the students participating broke up into groups to visit the platinum sponsors of the event – 3M, Optum and Medtronics. Later that night, all the participants attended the Networking Dinner, where they were given the rules of the competition.

The next morning, the case was presented to all of the teams in the competition. The case revolved around consulting the Office of Information Technology (OIT) for the University of Minnesota on how to prepare the university for infrastructure and research in the field of Internet of Things (IoT).

Once the case was distributed, teams were confined to their hotel room for 24 hours to prepare a solution to present to the judges the next day. The presentations took place on Saturday, April 1st in a series of rounds. Despite great efforts and a fantastic presentation, UConn’s team did not make it to the final round of the competition.

“We gained a lot of great experience to bring back to the class and prepare for next year,” Professor Moore said, following the competition.

Moore said he is looking forward to competing in CoMIS in the future and he was impressed with the work of his students being that it was the first time he has had a team compete on such a big stage.

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