CASE-IN Backstage: how to organize an international case championship in self-isolation

For the first time, two Leagues of the qualifying round of the international engineering championship "CASE-IN", a competition system for solving engineering cases, were held at the site of the Electrotechnical University.

The first one, the League of Young Specialists, is contested by representatives of companies in the fuel and energy and mineral resource complexes under the age of 35 and young scientists. The team of our university included a representative of INPROTECH, A. A. Bezrukov, Deputy Director of INPROTECH for Career Guidance, senior lecturer at the Department of Quality Systems Management. The result is the 5th place and the solution of the case, recognized by an expert jury from companies in the fuel and energy sector and MSC.

The CASE-IN Student League is represented by several areas, and on April 30, LETI became the "home" for the Digital Atom and Electric Power Engineering areas.

The preparation for participation in the Championship began back in February and was carried out by the INPROTECH case laboratory, created as part of the project "From Engineering knowledge to Managerial Decision-making" with the support of the Rosmolodezh Foundation in close cooperation with the administration of the FCTI and the FEA.

During March, the case lab staff, with the support of the deans of FEA and FCTI, formed inter-faculty teams. To solve complex engineering cases, it is important that team members have different competencies. Hard skills are also important – design, calculation of technical parameters, assessment of risks or economic impact, and soft skills – leadership, teamwork skills, presentation of project results, therefore, students of FCTI, INPROTECH and FEA joined the teams. More than 20 students from our Institute took part in the Championship. We worked together with FEA students in the Electric Power Industry League, and together with the guys from FCTI in the Digital Atom League.

The challenge for the participants and organizers was the transfer of the Championship to a remote format. The preparation of teams and work with curators have moved into the format of webinars and online consultations. The case lab staff conducted 9 webinars, where the students were told about organizational issues, gave recommendations on presentation and preparation of the presentation.  Special attention was paid to the economic assessment of projects, an important component of solving any case. Seminars on this topic were kindly agreed to be conducted by A.I. Maisel, Associate Professor of the Department of International Business at St. Petersburg State University, and S.E. Gulyaevsky, Associate Professor of the Department of Applied Economics at St. Petersburg State University.

The "remote control" not only did not frighten the participants, but even facilitated the preparation, it became easier to organize communication, find time for meetings and discuss cases. The assignment was given on April 17, and on April 30, 16 teams came out to defend – an excellent result for the new remote format. 

Yuri Perevalov, Deputy Dean of the FEA: "Students prefer to communicate via messengers and social networks, so the new format of the championship did not cause any particular difficulties. Each team created its own chat, in which they corresponded and a cloud data warehouse, where they placed the best practices for solving the case. Almost every chat had a supervisor and a responsible supervisor, one of whom was me. It was necessary to remotely monitor the teams and ensure that no one went beyond the scope of the event and business ethics. Students of different faculties, groups and courses were united by a common desire to win the CASE-IN championship, the participants showed teamwork skills, as well as skills of working with a lot of information, as a result, all gained invaluable experience.». 

We asked the INPROTECH students to participate CASE-IN share your most vivid impressions of the last Championship:

Daria Pryadko, the Rotor and Stator team

"The highlight was, of course, the day the teams performed and presented their decision. It was kind of disturbing before the performance, because we had been preparing and rehearsing for so long. Waiting for their turn, the performance of other teams, questions from experts – it was all so exciting and interesting. Our presentation went very quickly, it felt even faster than 6 minutes according to the schedule. It was nice to get a lot of questions, and after the performance, it immediately became easy and joyful for the whole team. This was our first experience with such a case, and the result pleased the entire team. We did it with a bang!"

Elizaveta Semenenko, captain of the Electrogeni teamuses»

"The most striking moment in the preparation process is the moment of the conception of an idea, when something worthwhile begins to form out of a huge amount of information piece by piece, like a puzzle."

Kogan Diana, Asynchronous team

"I really liked the way our team's work was organized. As soon as we came up with a solution, we immediately distributed responsibilities among the participants, which contributed to fruitful work. We called each other every evening, discussed what we had done during the day, planned what we were going to do, and, you know, with each new conversation, it was noticeable how people were getting closer, they had topics for conversation and their own jokes. The moment when you become a team, not because you were assigned that way, but because you wanted it and came to it. It doesn't really matter if we won or lost, because in any case we got a lot more – useful experiences, friends and unforgettable emotions."

A source: LETI