Wooster Senior Part of Winning Team at Business Case Competition

Places first at University of Rochester's Simon Graduate School of Business

WOOSTER, Ohio, Nov. 23, 2009 – Eric Babbitt, a senior business economics major from Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., was part of the winning team in a national business case competition at the University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business earlier this month.

Babbitt’s group bested 49 others to capture first place in the fourth annual Early Leaders Case Competition. The winning team also included undergraduate students from Allegheny College, Barnard College, Lafayette College, and the University of Rochester. The five-person team split a $7,000 first prize.

The competitors were handed background information on Zipcar and given 24 hours to develop a proposal for a strategic expansion or innovation for the fast-growing – but not yet profitable – car-sharing service.

“We spent probably 21 of the next 24 hours working on our proposal,” Babbitt says.  “It was a pretty grueling experience.”

After brainstorming and rejecting dozens of ideas, the team finally hit upon one they liked: a plan to gradually convert a significant portion of Zipcar’s fleet to electric vehicles. Since Zipcar users pay a flat hourly or daily rate and don’t pay for gas, rising gas prices eat straight into the company’s bottom line. By converting to electric vehicles, the team argued, Zipcar could free itself from that fuel price volatility, while also bolstering the company’s green credentials, a key selling point for their young, urban target audience.

The team members split up the tasks necessary to build their proposal, with Babbitt taking the lead on developing the financial analysis and plan. Twenty-four hours after they began, the team made a 15-minute presentation to a panel of business school faculty and MBA students.

“[The judges] kept commenting that it was hard to believe that the contestants were not already enrolled in graduate business programs,” said Greg MacDonald, executive director of admissions and administration at the Simon School.

For Babbitt, who plans to enter an MBA program after graduating from Wooster next May, “It was a great experience, an opportunity to work with four other people with very different backgrounds and training. I was able to apply the leadership theories I’ve learned at Wooster, and get the real-world experience of working as part of a team.”