What IESE Case Competitions Add Beyond the Classroom

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The case method is part of daily academic life at IESE. Case competitions add something different: a team has to solve a live or externally judged problem against other teams, often with a company, another school or a student club shaping the challenge.

Recent IESE examples show that this is not one standardized extracurricular activity.

A company case can connect directly to recruiting

In 2025, Taisuke Ojima and Naoyuki Mayumi (MBA 2025) wrote about an NTT DATA case competition created through the Japan Business Club with support from the Consulting and Energy clubs. Five first-year teams, more than 20 students in total, worked on the challenge. The winning team received a guaranteed internship opportunity, and the project helped create what the authors described as IESE’s first MBA internship at NTT DATA, a concrete example of a club activity turning directly into employer access.

An external competition changes the audience

Later in 2025, IESE students Monica Belen, Hanif Ramadhan and Uday Govil, MBA 2027, described reaching the finals of the INSEAD Product Games in Singapore and winning the competition. The event began with 85 submissions and narrowed to four finalist teams. Their account highlights product work, faculty and mentor support, and the experience of representing IESE outside Barcelona.

Student-built competitions can create an ecosystem of their own

Baptiste Duplan (MBA 2026) describes helping launch IESE’s first Inter-MBA Search Fund Competition in 2026, a good example of students creating the competition they wanted when it didn’t exist yet. (There’s more on IESE’s search-fund scene in Why Search Funds Are So Visible at IESE.)

A 2025 IESE Japan podcast with Takahiro Iwano and Koki Kimura adds a useful distinction between case competitions and ordinary case-method classes. The classroom develops repeated decision-making practice; the competition adds selection, team strategy, external judging and often a much more concentrated deadline.

The value depends on what you want to practice

For some students, the main payoff is recruiting exposure. For others it is product thinking, investing, presentation under pressure or simply working with a different team than the assigned academic group.

What’s hard to see from the outside is how students hear about the best competitions, how competitive internal team selection is, how much time a competition really takes and whether the strongest ones regularly lead to interviews, internships or employer relationships.

Competed while at IESE? Reply below with the competition, the problem you worked on, how your team was selected, the time it took, how judging worked and what happened afterward.

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