Focus on Limiting the Downside - Lessons Learned from my First Case Comp

Initially I was super excited to work on my first case competition. For those unfamiliar with case competitions, they are

purposefully challenging projects that teams of students elect to do in our free time in an effort to win prize money or to network with the company sponsoring the competition. My excitement precipitously dissipated after spending over 14 hours indoors meeting in conference rooms on a Sunday.

Our challenge was to reduce carbon emissions in the LA metropolitan area by 25% over the next 10 years through a profitable new company or a new venture of an existing company. Though the problem was interesting and complex, I found myself disheartened by the level of difficulty, and I wondered how other teams did it. After my team competed and got eliminated, we got to watch the Round Two Presentation of the team that eventually took 2nd place.

The 2nd place team's idea sounded less profitable than other ideas I heard from other teams that also got eliminated first round. That team's presentation style was also lacking - the slides were unoriginal and one of the speakers stared at the lectern while speaking. The thing that made them stand out was that they did a brilliant job explaining how they would limit the potential downsides. They had multiple contingency plans, scenario analysis, and a pilot program.

As much as investors love taking risks, they want to limit risks as much as possible. They want to see proof of concept and risk mitigation. As student amateurs to case competitions, we can be easily excited by the potential upsides. We can emotionally attach ourselves to cool, innovative, creative, new ideas instead of drilling down on our weaknesses.

If I could do this case competition over again, I would devote more time to researching creative ways to limit the risks associated with the idea that we were pitching. In fact, I would budget as much time to figuring out how to limit the downsides as I would with raising the upsides. Even businesses that seem to have a lot of potential fail due to one or two fatal mistake(s).

My experience in this case comp taught me to shift my mindset FROM trying to come up with the most brilliant new idea TO identifying the risks in the industry and where the opportunities lie given those risks.