After winning the gold medal in a case study competition in Norway, four Serbian students and their professors got back from Oslo full of impressions.
Students Stefan Ignjatovic, Anja Koprivica, Branislav Bandic and Andreja Sreckovic from the Belgrade University’s Faculty of Organisational Sciences won first place at BI International Case Competition 2016 in Oslo beating 11 top business schools in the world.
The problem was to be solved within 32 hours and they were closed up in a room. The task was to make the Norwegian Hydro company bigger, better and greener by the end of the year 2020. They proposed three strategies, first to recycle, then to focus on reducing cost and CO2 emission, and expand and rather improve their competitive advantage which is people.
“This is why we won. We understood the company and the way they do business and the whole mindset of Norway,” students say adding that it was one of the hardest cases they have ever done as they were not familiar with aluminium industry.
Besides the gold medal, they got an unofficial job offer — CFO from Hydro approached them and asked if they were interested to live and work in Norway.
They also got to meet the Norwegian Princess Martha Louise. “She was coming in last with all the security and said — hi guys, how are you. And we were like — did the princess just say hi to us. She was that happy face in public who was always smiling and we would look at her all the time.”
They say they liked Oslo and its people a lot. “We are all really impressed by how the country works in general. We were amazed by the architecture, the way the city functions and the people, who are friendly and amazing. There is this stereotype that Northern people are much colder but that’s so not true. We made many friends from Norway.”
All in all, they admit it was a great experience both professionally and privately. Therefore, they are now working to further strengthen cooperation with BI. They are interested in further development and planning a lot of projects in order to promote the case study as a teaching method, but also to continue competing.