Congratulations to Jennifer Wong (MEng ’14) and her fellow UCB students for winning the Kellogg Biotech & Healthcare Case Competition!
Taken from MEng Student Experience Blog
During the last weekend of January, I was part of a team that flew to Chicago to compete for first prize at the Kellogg Biotech & Healthcare Case Competition. We had a title to defend, as teams from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business won first and third prizes in 2013.
A panel of AbbVie executives served as judges, who critiqued our solution to reduce pneumonia-related childhood mortality in Ugandan children. Our first-prize winning idea: a financial and business model of a year-long training program, that micro-finances local Ugandan mobile health workers who will deliver care directly to communities, and then graduate to jobs elsewhere in the medical sphere. What ultimately led us to our successful proposal was design thinking–we immersed ourselves in the challenge statement, covering walls in post-its and recklessly throwing in crazy ideas. This harks back to the first MEng case study with Professor Lee Fleming, Faculty Director of the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, during the Master of Engineering Boot Camp, when we looked at the human-centered, design philosophy which IDEO lives and breathes.
