Team wins Innovation Challenge

STAFFORD — A team of students from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter in Richmond — including Virginia native Jennifer Clinehens, whose parents reside in Aquia Harbour — have won an MBA Innovation Challenge and $20,000.

The challenge is a rigorous competition between graduate students to find creative technology solutions for businesses. And, VCU prevailed over students from schools including Harvard, Dartmouth and the University of California at Berkley to become “The World’s Most Innovative MBA Team."

The VCU Brandcenter ad students won by taking the top spot in the last round of the competition. The team, which represented the AT&T division, came up with a cloud-based smart platform solution for small businesses, and had previously prevailed over 60 teams from around the world. 

“After interviewing a handful of small business owners, we quickly learned that many didn’t understand the full value that cloud services could provide,” said Clinehens, the VCU team spokesperson. “Thanks to AT&T, our team was given an early look into the kinds of considerations that real businesses must address when deciding to incorporate cloud computing. This helped us to develop a tool from the small business owner’s perspective, something that gave them the opportunity to take control of their information.” 

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service instead of a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network (for instance, and typically, the Internet).

Clinehens is a creative brand management student at VCU, a professional violinist and a former small business owner.

 “Participants in the Innovation Challenge are the business leaders of tomorrow,” said Anil Rathi, CEO and founder of contest organizer Skild. “Collaboration with companies like AT&T is critical to providing insight into core technologies so that our teams can come up with innovative solutions to real-life problems.”

 “…The VCU team’s innovative approach to simplifying adoption of cloud computing for small businesses has a lot of potential and we’re thrilled to have been a collaborator in their winning submission,” said Sam Zellner, AT&T’s Executive Director of Innovation. 

Tracy Bell is managing editor of the Stafford County Sun. Reach her at tbell@insidenova.com.