The 2009 first place winners of the Biotech and Healthcare case competition sponsored by Genzyme. From left to right Michelle Huie, Elliott Hillback (Senior Vice President of Genzyme), Deepika Singh, Anisha Madan and Paul Altman. The team members are all from the Kellogg School’s Part-Time MBA Program.  Photo © Rich Foreman

Stanford, Kellogg Teams win 2010 Kellogg Biotech & Healthcare Case Competition

Teams from Stanford and Kellogg won the 2010 Kellogg Biotech & Healthcare Case Competition on January 23, 2010. 
Twelve teams from around the world met at the Kellogg School of Management for the competition, which was sponsored by Genzyme and Abbott.  In the end three teams rose above the rest.

The 2010 competition featured a case on Synvisc, a therapy for knee pain and was written by Professor Tim Calkins, one of the case competition coordinators. Teams had to evaluate a proposed clinical trial and recommend whether or not Genzyme should make the $50 million investment.  The case required teams to use both financial analysis and strategic thinking.

The competition featured seven judges, including four executives from Genzyme and three executives from Abbott.  Mark Twyman, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Synvisc, headed up the Genzyme team and John Larson, General Manager of Abbott Neuroscience, led the Abbott team. 

Teams had one week to work on the case.  In the competition, each team had twenty minutes to present their recommendation, with about five minutes for questions from the judges.  The judges gave each team tough questions, challenging key assumptions and analyses. After all of the teams presented the Synvisc leadership team reviewed key points of the case and then revealed what actually happened.

A record fifty teams from twenty different business schools applied to participate in the competition this year.  The top twelve teams received an invitation.  The competition included teams from Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Michigan, Cornell, Chicago Booth, Carnegie-Mellon, UVA Darden, MIT, Columbia-London and two teams from Kellogg.  During the competition each team used an assigned color to mask school affiliation.

The winning team was from Kellogg's part time MBA program.  Team members were Michael Senical, Varun Goyal, Guillermo Amezcua and David Chameli. The second place team was also from Kellogg's full time program and included Jeff Bird, Jerry Chan, Mike Watts and Ritesh Parekh. The Stanford team finished third.  Team members were Vandana Jain, Arvind Iyenger, Varun Jain and Nakul Narayan.

The 2009 third place winners of the Biotech and Healthcare case competition sponsored by Genzyme. Seated from left to right Christopher Carter '09, Michiko Aida '10 and Katherine McGrath '09. Standing from left are Clinical Professor Marketing Tim Calkins, Lynn Harris, Zsolt Abonyi '09, Genzyme SVP Elliott Hillback, Joris de Groot '09, Alicia Löffler, Director of the Center for Biotechnology and Dan Regan, SVP of Genzyme corporation.  Photo © Rich Foreman