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MBA Bosch Robotic Competition at Berkeley Haas
In 2011, Berkeley Haas School of Business’ European Business Club launched its first annual Robotics Business Model Competition. Built in partnership with the sponsor, Bosch Research and Technology, the European Business Club created the competition to help facilitate students’ business goals in European companies and in international companies in Europe. Bosch is a European company with satellite Research and Technology Centers in several major cities throughout North America, including in Palo Alto, CA, where the competition was held.
While the title of the challenge is “Robotic Competition”, the objective of the competition is not to engineer a robot, but instead to create a business model and proposal for Bosch executives with insightful, cutting-edge ideas on which sectors the company can branch into for future business. The vision of the challenge is “a personal robot in every home”, and the competition seeks out finalists with the design on how to do just that. Winners of the challenge are placed in first, second and third, and allocated a total sum of $9,000 in award money. Winners also receive a stipend to cover competition-related expenses over the course of the six-week competition, which begins in mid-Fall to select finalists and concludes in early Winter.
The first-place competition winners of the 2012 second annual Bosch competition were a team of five first-year Haas MBA students who dreamt and created a vision of a personal robot to address care for the elderly. The team’s winning idea, named Uplift, aims to address many challenges faced by the great aging population of America by helping to facilitate communication with family members, timely medication reminders and dispensaries, and assistance with mobility. By keeping the elderly independent and in their homes longer with the assistance of the Uplift personal robot, the elderly will be able to maintain independence longer and thus reduce contemporaneous assisted living expenses.
While the competition is open to all Berkeley students, each team must include at least one MBA student, as the overarching purpose of the competition is to create a business proposal. The competition gives Haas MBA students the distinct opportunity to put their academic knowledge into action, gain wider awareness of the social issues that surround the global community, and meet the possibility of seeing their abstract idea be put into tangible reality.