Founders went after Harvard
Case Competition founder Annette Wilde (left) poses with co-founder Nora Kelly (right) and retired professor J. Pierrre Brunet, now on the advisory board of the competition.
Photo by kate hutchinson
When they organized Canada’s first national MBA case competition at Concordia 25 years ago, Annette Wilde and Nora Kelly only wanted to create some Ivy League-calibre competition.
“Harvard had a competition, but it wasn’t international and we didn’t have one of our own, so we mimicked theirs,” Wilde said. “Back then, our plan was to compete with Harvard — or to outdo them completely.”
In the fall of 1981, the two MBA students started to piece together what has since grown into the John Molson School of Business International MBA Case Competition.
They compiled cases, found judges and secured university approval, space and sponsors, no simple task in those times, Wilde said. “This was the year of the first referendum, so there was this mass exodus of companies that all went to Toronto.”
Wilde said they invited every school in Canada with an MBA program to compete in the bilingual competition.
Five accepted: the Université du Québec à Montréal, Université Laval, McGill University, the University of Ottawa and the Université de Moncton. That year, McGill and UQAM shared first prize.
Kelly recalled the enthusiasm of the participating schools. “The team from l’Université de Moncton arrived at the competition in a nice car, smoking cigars. This left a great impression on us.”
The next year, the number of teams rose to 16. The competition went international in 1992 when two teams from the United States and one from New Zealand took part.
Since its inception, the competition’s format has changed little, but the technology employed has changed a lot.“We didn’t have word processors to type out the responses. You had to get it into the typists’ pool so they would have time to turn it around,” Wilde said.
As an early sponsor, Alcan donated a trophy in the shape of a Canada goose. The Royal Bank donated $5,000 for the final banquet.
Wilde lives in Toronto, where she is a director at Planimetron Inc., and Kelly is New Brunswick’s Deputy Health and Wellness Minister. “It takes a lot of hands and imagination to grow an idea,” Kelly said.