Photo courtesy of Ilana Stonebraker from Purdue University

Competing against five other teams from business programs at IUPUI, Purdue, and Butler, a group of IU-Bloomington Kelley School of Business students won the Midwest Business Libraries Case Competition at Butler University on Nov. 4, 2017.  With support and sponsorship from the Business/SPEA Information Commons, the five-person team consisted of James He, Erin Riegar, Sandeep Gali, Radha Parikh, and Nick Broyles, all sophomores.

In its fourth year, the case competition, formerly known as the Parrish Library Case Competition, brings attention to the importance of business information literacy and research skills.  The IU team found this case “particularly unique,” with He saying that a go-to strategy for case competitions and business research from now on will be using the IU Libraries “databases - Simmons OneView, EBSCOhost, Mintel Reports, etc. - to expand the credibility and quality of work that I put out. From what I understand, these databases are expensive, and in my opinion, they're worth every penny and probably the most valuable set of resources available for any student who wants to undergo research.”

This years’ case involved Indiana-owned and operated Crew Carwash, who developed a case with Purdue University Libraries Faculty to examine its social media operations.  “The most challenging part of this case,” says He, “was in market segmentation, determining the best audience to target for car washes is a dilemma that probably doesn't hit many academics with a lot of passion - we had to think outside the box and make inferences to extrapolate useful information pertaining to consumer interests and demographics that Crew could target with their social media campaign.”  Indiana University's team took the top prize of $500 dollars, with Butler second ($300) and Purdue third ($100). Having participated in the competition for the past three years, this victory represents the first time a team from IU has won.