Graduate School of Business

Four teams of MBA students from the Yonsei Graduate School of Business earned Minister of Education, CEO, and Excellence awards at the 2016 MBA Business Case Analysis Conference. The competition was co-hosted by the Yonsei Graduate School of Business and the MoneyToday Network and sponsored by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy and the Ministry of Education. Management Professor Ho-Uk Lee was the chairperson of this year's competition's committee.

POSCO, the Korean steelmaker, suggested this year's case with a theme of “Developing Future New Growth Projects for the POSCO Group to Enhance Its Synergy.” The competition kept the teams busy for about three months, from orientation in August to the award ceremony on Nov. 29.

The eight teams who progressed to the final competed fiercely in a presentation November 17 at the Sangnam Institute of Management, which is affiliated with the Yonsei School of Business. All four Yonsei  MBA teams that made it to the finals earned awards.

The Wize Power team of Won Weok Kim (entering class of 2018, MBA), Seon Ho Lee (entering class of 2017, MBA), Jin O Jung (entering class of 2017, MBA), and Ki Seung Han (entering class of 2017, MBA), won the Minister of Education’s award. After identifying the core capabilities of POSCO's organization, they proposed a smart city development business model to apply to underdeveloped countries such as Tanzania. Kyung-Hoon Oh, general manager of POSCO’s Research Institute Future Business Team, who participated as a judge, said afterward the team’s “report was the result of the most in-depth research in history on the POSCO Group.”

The Beyond the Steel (BTS) team of Byung Moo Kang (entering class of 2017, MBA), Il Hwan Nam (entering class of 2017, MBA), Jae Woong Moon (entering class of 2017, MBA), and Tai Shik Choi (entering class of 2017, MBA) won the CEO Award of the MoneyTodayNetwork for its synergy-creating strategy for each affiliate of the Food Business Full Value Chain Foundation. The team proposed deployment of smart farms that use abandoned coal mines.

The TANC (Think, Act N Change) team of Jin Ik Park (entering class of 2017, MBA), Chang Hong Chung (entering class of 2017, MBA), Jae-hoon Jung (entering class of 2017, MBA), and Hyun Seok Jung (entering class of 2018, MBA), proposed a business model that uses battery and steel platforms as mediators,. The Together with Steel team of Sang Hyun Park (entering class of 2018, MBA), Na Yyoung Lee (entering class of 2018, MBA), Seok Lee(entering class of 2018, MBA), and Jae Woo Lee (entering class of 2018, MBA), emphasized the need to expand synergy that focuses on expanding steel-related businesses by proposing new 3-D printing businesses.

The Wize Power team, which won the Minister of Education’s award , said, "From deciding how to derive new growth projects to implementing strategies, many of the theories, such as HR, marketing, IT, finance and urban design that are learned from MBA programs were applied throughout the final report," and "It was a very meaningful competition, in that we learned the value of the knowledge that we have been taught by Yonsei MBA professors." 

"It was an opportunity to apply theories we learned through the Yonsei MBA course to POSCO and consider real-life issues. We were able to develop insights into technologies in the process of researching and applying smart solutions, AI, and big data during the Fourth Industrial Revolution," said Byeong Moo Kang, a winner of the CEO Award from the MoneyTodayNetwork.