College
of Business Communications Feature
One
of an occasional series of feature stories on the web
Illinois OSBI
Team Scores 4th Victory
in NASA Means Business National Competition
Illinois
launched another win in Houston with their "plan to travel 93,000,000
miles to Mars and to cultivate 100,000,000 supporters" for NASA.
This year's team to the NASA Means Business Competition kept Illinois'
record spotless, scoring a 4th consecutive victory in the rigorous three-day
competition.
Team presenters were first year Illinois MBA students Ryan Eyer, Emily Jelinek, and Martin Kator, plus Carolyn Rechel and Natalia Wodecki from the Advertising Department in the College of Communications. Support team members were MBA Sundhar Annanalai and Advertising students Claire Kim and Erik Smithson. Second-year MBA Kurt Trauth acted as engagement manager for this year-long Office for Strategic Business Initiatives project.
Presenting multi-media projects featuring original public service announcements, all teams worked to convince the 10 NASA judges that they had the best ideas, strategy, and implementation to inform, educate, and inspire the American people to support the NASA program. Using themes of creation, progress and unity, Team Illinois focused on children, families, and teachers as holding the key to future support.
Their ideas included an interactive website and the MarsStars Patch Program. The I3 (for ideas, inventions, and innovation) Space Capsule Program features a trunk filled with products that have resulted from the space program. Examples include freeze-dried foods, aerodynamic swimming and cycling suits, fogless ski goggles, and video-game joysticks. Several trunks would be deployed to grade schools and high schools around the country to help students, teachers, and parents better understand the impact the space program has had.
The judges' comments were highly complimentary. One sample: "Put a bow on it - Illinois is ready for the CEO."
Competing against the University of Illinois team were teams from MIT; Stanford; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Texas at Austin; Texas A & M; Auburn University; Chapman University, Orange, CA; and the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA.
--Anne
Grinols
May 2003