Babson Student Business Teams Win in Not-for-Profit Competition

Winning Team Worked with Bay State Games; 2^nd Place Helped Somerville Chamber

The Babson undergraduate student team that evaluated the content and customer satisfaction of the Bay State Games Opening Ceremony won Babson’s Shelby Cullom Davis Entrepreneurship Prize. This year the first-place award is $3000 and the runner up team receives $2000 for completing the most successful non-profit MCFE project in 2008.

The winning team of undergraduates who worked as part of a Management Consulting Field Experience(MCFE) project included Nick Malia, Ryan Meadows, Michael Rogosa, and Shannon Singleton. They made recommendations to the Massachusetts Amateur Sports Foundation (MASF) representatives to improve the opening ceremony of the Bay State Games and to increase attendance.

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First place team pictured from left are project manager George Lee, students Malia, Meadows, and Rogosa (Singleton is missing), with Babson president Leonard Schlesinger, Diana Davis Spencer, president of the Kathryn W. Davis Foundation, Brittany Rheault, Marketing rep, and Kevin Cummings, President, of MASF.

The runner-up team worked with the Somerville Chamber of Commerce to guide them to: Achieve GreaterIndependence through Development, their project title. The team, including Simon Bennaim, Shi Ming Chung, Konstantina Papadopoulos, Shaina Silva, and project manager, Andrea Wolf, met their goals to establish objectives for an optimal financial situation, gain financial freedom to enable the community’s will, manage the effects of that financial freedom, understand together how this impacts the community, and agree upon how to measure progress.

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From left, Babson president Leonard Schlesinger, Somerville Chamber of Commerce president Stephen Mackey, MCFE team member Konstantina Papadopoulos, K. W. Davis Foundation president Diana Davis Spencer, project manager Andrea Wolf, MCFE member Simon Bennaim, and Babson lecturer Dwight Gertz.

The Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation saw the need to apply entrepreneurial thinking to the management of non-profit organizations, and therefore provided an endowment to Babson College to support that effort. The foundation, established in 1962, is named for the late Shelby Cullom Davis, former United States ambassador to Switzerland, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and chairman of the oldest and largest company specializing in insurance securities.

The Management Consulting Field Experience (MCFE) program provides an opportunity for students to implement business practices while applying classroom learning in a challenging, real-world consulting setting with a sponsor company. MCFE projects involve teams of three to five student consultants who are led and managed by an MBA student or advisor serving as the project manager. Teams are selected based on their entrepreneurial thinking, teamwork, creativity, business skills, and dedication.