GMAC Awards US$260,000 in Prizes to Winners of Ideas to Innovation Challenge

Updated on: Thursday, January 27, 2011

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), owner of the GMAT exam, today announced that it is presenting more than US$260,000 in prizes to 21 people whose ideas to creatively change management education rose above all other entries in the Council’s global Ideas to Innovation (i2i) Challenge.

The winners represent nine countries and include business school students, university faculty members and a team including a company president and an intern. More than 650 people from 60 countries entered ideas in the competition, which ran from July to October 2010. Half of the ideas were submitted by business school alumni and current and prospective students.

The i2i Challenge is a major component of the GMAC Management Education for Tomorrow (MET) Fund, a US$10 million initiative to advance business education around the world. GMAC plans to invest a substantial portion of the MET Fund in the implementation of one or more of the winning ideas.

The first prize of US$50,000 is going to Alice Stewart, PhD, an associate professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in the United States. Stewart won the i2i Challenge with her idea to allow management education students to use “stackable knowledge units” to craft customised degree programs closely aligned with today’s information-based economy.

Four other ideas are receiving prizes of US$25,000 each, 10 will take home US$10,000 apiece and another five are earning US$2,500 honorable mention citations. These proposals include requiring business school students to translate classroom concepts into full-fledged business plans; developing an Internet-based video repository for research; and exposing MBA candidates to mandatory entrepreneurship training.

Details about all the winning entries and the people who sent them in are available at www.gmac.com/i2iwinners. “The joy of this contest is that it was an open invitation to everybody. I couldn’t be more gratified about the enormous global response we received to our call for the possible ways business schools can innovate,” said Dave Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC. “These ideas have the very real potential to change management education for years and even decades to come. One of these ideas, may, in the end, change the way our grandchildren study management. It is an honour that GMAC can play the role of angel investor in providing resources to bring the
ideas to life, ” said Wilson.

During the next phase of the i2i Challenge, which begins today and runs through October 5, GMAC will accept proposals to implement one or more of the winning ideas from business schools and other nonprofit organisations that deliver education programs. The Council plans to tap the GMAC MET Fund to underwrite one or more of the best proposals.

Information about submitting a proposal is available at www.gmac.com/i2iproposal. “The real beauty of the i2i Challenge is that it’s about more than individual business schools— it’s about taking ideas from all over the world and giving schools the chance to interpret them in ways that work best for their own programs,” said Alex Sevilla, assistant dean and director of MBA programmes at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration and chair of the GMAC board of directors. “This initiative will allow those of us who run business schools to sync new ways of thinking with our own DNA and create something unique,” added Sevilla.

GMAC Awards US$260,000 in Prizes to Winners of Ideas to Innovation Challenge

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