UCD Smurfit School students win top award at Shanghai World Expo 2010


16 Jul 2010

The prestigious Schneider Electric Award has been won by a team from the CEMS masters in international management at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School for their ‘SC Tree’ solar-change project at the Shanghai Expo 2010 Awards.

The competition received more than 300 projects from business school teams from around the globe.

The Shanghai Expo attracted hundreds of thousands of people from across the world, focusing on the theme of ‘Better City, Better Life’. The ‘SC Tree’ project was designed to enable slum inhabitants to become entrepreneurs by providing them with an ecological, technological and social business model that would make their environment more sustainable and a better place to live. The students were awarded with a €3,600 cash prize, an all-expenses three-night stay in Shanghai (including access to the World Expo) and mentoring with representatives of leading international companies.

Celebrating the news

“We all have different backgrounds and nationalities, share the affinity for entrepreneurship and saw this competition as a unique opportunity to combine our skills in order to create a sustainable venture for megacities. We enjoyed the process leading to our final business proposal very much because it was an outstanding chance to learn a lot about the challenges of megacities and to become creative in finding problems to solve these,” the team, Kai Hermsen, Tineke Franssen and Karel Vanacker, jointly said.

UCD Smurfit School is proud to be part of the CEMS alliance and to be Ireland’s only university to offer the world’s No 1 Masters in Management programme,” said Prof Tom Begley, dean of UCD Smurfit School. “We congratulate the winning team on their fantastic achievement and their success is testimony of the quality and calibre of students this prestigious programme attracts.”

CEMS is a strategic alliance of 27 member schools from four continents and more than 50 corporate partners. The CEMS masters in international management programme, which is offered exclusively in Ireland at UCD Smurfit School, was ranked as the No 1 masters in management in the world by the Financial Times in 2009.