{ Google Case Champions – 2019 }

UTS is well known for its business society and the case competitions that the university participates in. As a software student with a sound understanding in business, case competing was that something that I wanted to invest time into. At the start of the autumn semester of 2019, the UTS business society promoted the Google Case competition. This competition was an event designed to challenge Sydney based universities to deliver an accessible product feature that could be applied to one of Google’s current products.

The competition followed a three-stage process.
Stage 1: Assembling a team and submitting your presentation deck and idea to your university. To move on to stage 2, your idea had to be selected among all the submissions within the university.

Stage 2: After being selected, your team had to compete against all other selected teams and present your pitch to a variety of board members (Within UTS, this was presented to a variety of members within the business society). After competing, two teams would be chosen by the board to represent UTS and present their idea to Google Employees at Google’s office in Sydney.

Stage 3: This was the final stage of the competition. Each team would present their idea against all Sydney based universities.

Our team consisted of 4 team memebers, Joseph, Jasmine, Justin, Nick (myself). Our first issue to tackle was selecting an existing Google product that we could improve in a certain way. After conducting three meetings, our path led us to the education sector. From there, we began investigating Google Classroom as it was a tool some of our team members had previously used before. With various amounts of researching, we eventually came to the conclusion of education for students with special needs.

Our team compiled a presentation deck for our solution, Google classroom Squared. This solution tackled a significant gap in the education market and Google Classroom’s software capabilities. Our answer would allow teachers to design activities and homework problems, tailored to an individual student with an individual need/requirement. It would also allow teachers to complete this for a range of students within a small time frame. Additionally, the software would enable family members to be on board with the process and have easy accessibility so they could also help these students from home.

After submitting our presentation deck, we qualified as one of eight teams within UTS to compete against other UTS teams for stage 2. As this was our first case competition, there was a lot of room for improvement for our team in regards to what we should present. A lot of the other groups illustrated the financial projections and costs of their ideas, which was a significant element missing from our deck. Fortunately, our solution met the criteria, and our team was chosen as one of two teams out of eight to represent UTS at Google’s office in the final round.

To prepare for the final round and meet the desired caliber, our team stripped apart our presentation deck and redesigned our presentation approach. We conducted a large amount of market research, contacting schools and special needs schools to ask if they would use this product and what their budget was. We identified what schools would pay for this product. We asked parents if they would pay for this product and at what price. Our team also stripped away any content-heavy content slides to make the presentation as readable and engaging as possible. Our last significant improvement was question preparation. We researched 50 typical pitch questions and questioned each other. If we didn’t know how to answer it, we stopped and thought of a solution. This preparation paid off enormously when the Google board members asked us questions.

As the final round completed, our team (New Jersey) was successful in taking 1st place for this competition across all the universities in Sydney. With a significant amount of preparation, we were able to answer all questions from the panel. Our solution fulfilled the given criteria and presented a solution to a real need in the educational market and Google’s current product, Google Classroom.

Overall the experience was challenging, exciting, and rewarding. Personally, I improved my presentation abilities, my business understanding, my growth as a team player, and I was able to gain some valuable industry connections. I look forward to competing in the 2020 Google Case competition.