At BGU, a concerted effort is made
to engage with the international academic arena. This is realized through
collaborative research, joint projects, student exchanges and – as CABGU Quebec
supporters are fortunate to know – participation in international events like
the John Molson MBA
International Case Competition and the Engineering Commerce Case Competition (ECCC) at
Concordia.
CABGU Quebec has supported a BGU
team at the John Molson event for seven consecutive years, and in 2015 was
privileged to enable a group of BGU students and their Coach to join the ECCC.
In the 2015 and 2016 competitions BGU’s team derived important benefits from
their participation in the ECCC and managed to score very respectably in the
middle range.
This year the ECCC welcomed 7
Canadian teams and one each from Egypt, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, the United
States, and of course, our Israeli team from BGU. The
2017 BGU team placed second out of 12 teams from around the world. The winner was the University of Limerick.
The competition is structured this way: there are two cases for which
the teams have six hours to prepare, followed by fifteen minutes to deliver
their presentation to the judges and a short period of Q & A. The third case
is more complex, with a prep time of twelve hours followed by presentation the
next morning. The teams with the highest overall scores are invited to present
their third case again in the finals.
All cases involve business problems
that require engineering solutions. BGU’s team featured four outstanding young
adults who are pursuing degrees in engineering and/or business and management.
Like all the BGU students we have met over the years, they represent a
fascinating range of backgrounds, academic interests and extracurricular
pursuits – from race cars to debating to developing student
entrepreneurship.
The final case at the ECCC was a
challenge from Bombardier to develop a plan for ten years from now to assure its
profitable position in the transportation marketplace. Our team, called Added Value, believed that
the answer is in short-and medium-range transportation and proposed the
development of a two-seater autonomous drone for personal aviation - the
BombarDrone - capable of travelling a distance of approximately 100km. These
battery-operated drones will be eco-friendly and sustainable and have a low
infrastructure cost. The target market for this plan is China, beginning with
Beijing, a huge city with serious transportation challenges, whose growing
middle class will be able to afford the cost of this speedy means of mobility.
As the marketing plan promises, “The BombarDrone is your own flying
carpet”.
CABGU Quebec is delighted to
congratulate the 2017 ECCC team from BGU - Rotem Duani (team leader) and Yossi Myerson both engineering students; and Dor Gal and Roni Raviv, from the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management – and extends warm wishes to Prof. Amir Shapiro, Director of the
Robotics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who initiated
BGU’s participation in the event in 2015 and who was unfortunately unable to
attend this year. Financial support was provided by the University, the City of
Beer-Sheva and CABGU Quebec’s generous donors.
L-R: Dor Gal, Rotem
Duani, Roni Raviv, Yossi Myerson
BGU
team ECCC 2017
Roni
Raviv – 24, a
second year Business Management student, with a focus on Marketing. Starting
soon as a marketing intern in the BGR (Ben-Gurion Racing) group, a program for
the engineering students that builds a formula car and races against teams
around the globe at the Formula ASE contest. She also works as a salesperson at
"Sabon", a company for natural ingredients and beauty products.
Yossi
Myerson, 27, a
fourth year Electrical Engineering student, currently working for Mellanox
Technologies, an Israeli high-tech company specialising in high speed
communications. Yossi has also represented BGU in the European Debating
Championship, and is currently volunteering with high-school students working
on cyber security projects.
Dor Gal, 27, a second-year Computer Science
and Management student. Served for 6 years in the IDF, in special intelligence
unit. During his army service, Dor lead several technical teams as an officer,
and was released a Lieutenant. Dor currently volunteers as the Executive
Manager of “Starter - Student's Entrepreneur and Innovation Club”, and works as
a Digital Solution Architect for Microsoft.
Rotem Duani, 27, is pursuing her degree at BGU in
Industrial Engineering and Management, she volunteers in Starter BGU, a student
organization which encourages students to become entrepreneurs. Rotem is the
starter class manager, a program which escorts students who want to develop
their own startup. This will be Rotem’s second year at the ECCC
Prof. Amir Shapiro, Coach, who coached the BGU team in 2015-2016, is Associate Professor and Director of the robotics laboratory in BGU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. His interests include locomotion of multi-limbed mechanisms in unstructured complex environments, motion planning algorithms for multi-limbed robots, robot grasping-design, control, and stability analysis, dynamic manipulations, climbing robots, snake-like robots, robots on-line motion planning, and agriculture robotics
