3 takeaways from the winners of the 2022 Gilead Pharma Case Competition

We are proud to announce that three IMBA students from the January 2022 intake placed first in the 3rd edition of the Gilead Pharma Case Competition on November 18th, 2022. This is a global competition that welcomes graduate students across multiple fields. The aim is to expose talented international graduate students to the biotech and pharmaceutical industry. Every year the contestants are asked to build and pitch strategic solutions to a real-world business scenario.

Teams must be composed of 3-4 students from the same university, however they can be enrolled in different degrees or programs. While conducting their research to solve their cases, each team was permitted to address materials from the public domain and seek assistance from anyone that had participated in the competition before in order to prepare for the case. After their cases were distributed on October 26th, 2022, teams were prohibited from receiving support from industry specialists or active faculty.

The IE team consisted of (see picture above) Olga Sukhorukova (Russia), Dr. Joshua Fergus Ginnane (Australia), and Tomas Albuquerque (Portugal). Their winning presentation was titled “Biozam Sustainability Strategy”. They were instructed to establish a sustainability strategy for the next four years for a Biopharma company. They defined the company’s strategic goals and proposed a budget allocation strategy to specific projects in the environmental, social, and governance initiatives.

Here are 3 takeaways from our winning team:
1. Competitions are a great way to integrate your studies. We used skills from nearly every class we have taken this year.
2. Diversity in the team really helps. Each of us brought very different perspectives to solve the case.
3. Anything is achievable if you have a highly driven team with a positive mindset.

The team delivered their final presentation amongst four other strong teams dawning from noteworthy schools such as Yale, Cambridge, Colombia and Insead.

Congratulations once again to Olga, Joshua and Tomas!