UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of five Penn State Smeal College of Business residential MBA students won the 2022 MBA Sustainability Case Competition.
Smeal’s team consisted of James McGivern, Sasha Escue, Matthew Dinacci, Dorothy Coplan and Daniel Clark. That group received $10,000 and placed ahead of the second-place team from North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, which received $5,000. Third place and $2,500 went to a team from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Two teams from Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business finished fourth and fifth.
The competition consisted of two rounds and featured 20 teams from across the country. The preliminary round involved electronic submissions of case analyses. A panel of reviewers then selected the semifinalists, which were invited to University Park to present their cases in person.
This year’s case, which was sponsored by IBM, focused on business response to climate change. Global carbon dioxide concentrations stand at 416 parts per million (ppm) and evidence of a changing climate is all around us with devastating human consequences.
On one hand, companies are taking action, or at least making commitments to take action, in a wide variety of areas. Many companies are investing in, or planning to, carbon offsets to meet climate targets, a market the consultancy McKinsey estimates will grow by a factor of 15 by 2030 to become a $30-50 billion industry.
At the same time, there has been increasing scrutiny of carbon offsets, pointing to data that such offsets don’t actually reduce emissions, and may in fact be making things worse.
The judges for the finals included:
- Wayne Balta, vice president for environmental affairs and product safety, IBM
- Edan Dionne, vice president for environmental, energy and chemical management systems, IBM
- Meghan Hoskins, associate director of operations, Penn State Sustainability Institute