Another international win for MBA students

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Tuesday, 9 July 2002

Students from the Adelaide Graduate School of Business have scored another significant success in an international business planning competition.

Masters of Business Administration (MBA) students Nathaniel Last and David Thomas have won first prize in the Asia Pacific Students' Entrepreneurship Forum, a three-day competition hosted by the National University of Singapore and involving teams from 10 other universities. A total of 12 teams made up of 13 different nationalities took part in the final. The win is the second significant success this year for MBA students from the Adelaide Graduate School of Business. In April, an Adelaide team won the $100,000 first prize in the National MOOT CORP Australia Venture Capital competition with a business plan for a new wine closure device.

The latest success brings with it a prize of $35,000, which the Adelaide team will share with joint winners, the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Adelaide team's winning project addressed problems faced by a Northern Territory prawn business contending with isolation from its main markets in New South Wales and growing inefficiencies amongst its supply chain members. The team used information technology to develop an e-commerce solution. The prawn business's production system and costs were analysed, and the team demonstrated how a marriage between IT and integrated supply chain management could increase its competitiveness, enable it to respond more quickly to market demands and get its product to market more speedily. The firm has since adopted most of the plan with considerable success.

Nathaniel Last and David Thomas now intend to develop the plan into a package that can be used by any remote agri-business in Australia.

The team was introduced to the competition, and guided through the project, by Senior Lecturer Dr Daniel Vekstein, who teaches an e-Business course at the Adelaide Graduate School of Business.

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