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October 27 the University of Connecticut School of Business participated in the Travelers IT Case Competition. In this year’s competition, six teams representing schools all across Minnesota and Connecticut, competed against each other in an effort to market insurance to millennials using technology. Each team was given two weeks to create a innovative strategy to tackle this problem. They were allotted 20 minutes to present their ideas towards a solution in front of a judging panel of Travelers’ senior management. Following the presentation, the judging panel had ten minutes to ask any questions they had in regards to the project.
Each school invited was allowed one team, composed of three members chosen from the school’s sponsor. The participants from the University of Connecticut, Victoria Trautman (MIS), Benjamin Bosco (MIS), and Arshia Monshi (Business Administration), were introduced two weeks prior to the competition and given the case to work on. The team decided to build a seamless platform that included both a website and application that tied into a dash cam system. In theory, the app would connect to the dash camera that records a user as he or she drives to see how many times a millennial checks his or her phone. In order to spread word of such an app, the group implemented a detailed social media strategy to enhance the application’s popularity and usage rate.
Case competitions are important to give students the exposure to real world problems and encourage their critical thinking, problem solving, and leadership skills. Victoria Trautman (MIS), spoke of the importance of participating in case competitions saying, “it is a great learning experience working with people from all over the Connecticut area in different fields.” This case competition was especially important to the students because it acted as a round of an interview for the summer internship program they were all trying to get in to. This allowed them to show off their presentation skills while networking with potential future employers.