Schulich MBA team wins Rotman CSR case competition

Toronto , February 14, 2010 - A team of MBA students from Schulich School of Business atYork University won the fifth annual Rotman International Net Impact Corporate Social Responsibility Case Competition, held over the weekend at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. A team from the Rotman School placed second with students from Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management coming third.

“This year’s competition demonstrates the increasing awareness of CSR perspectives in decision making among MBA students. Not only did we get overwhelming number of teams registering for the competition, but the quality of the presentations also showed that students had put considerable amount of effort in integrating triple bottom line considerations into their recommendations,” says Siddharth Verma, a Rotman MBA student and competition chair. “Given the rising demand of transparency and accountability of corporations, this shows that MBA students are well positioned to be the next generation of leaders in the real world.”

The competing teams tackled a case which featured a medium-sized web hosting company in Germany and its decision to develop a structured CSR initiative as part of its overall business strategy. In their presentations to the judges, who were drawn from a wide range of firms, social organizations and not-for-profit organizations, students needed to address both the financial and social bottom lines.

The competition was generously supported by Research in Motion and the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School. Complete details on the competition are available online at: http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/csrcasecomp/