HEC Montreal Win Rotman CSR Case Competition

Toronto, February 17, 2010 – A team of MBA students from HEC Montreal won the fourth annual Rotman International Net Impact Corporate Social Responsibility Case Competition, held over the weekend at the Rotman School of Management. A team from the Rotman School placed second with students from McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management coming third.

"This year’s competition demonstrates the increasing awareness of CSR perspectives in decision making among MBA students. Not only did we get overwhelming number of teams registering for the competition, but the quality of the presentations also showed that students had put considerable amount of effort in integrating triple bottom line considerations into their recommendations," says Julia Koo, a Rotman MBA student and competition chair. "Given the rising demand of transparency and accountability of corporations, this shows that MBA students are well positioned to be the next generation of leaders in the real world."

The competing teams tackled a case which featured a well-known natural resource company and its decision on whether to invest in a war-torn country in the Middle East. In their presentations to the judges, who were drawn from a wide range of firms, social organizations and not-for-profit organizations, students needed to address both the financial and social bottom lines.

The competition was generously supported by Research in Motion, Steelcase, AIC Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School, and Canadian Centre for Ethics and Corporate Policy.

Complete details on the competition are available online at: http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/csrcasecomp