A team of students from the Daniels Faculty and the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management has won the annual Rotman Design Challenge. This is the first year that a team from U of T has won the competition, which brings together top talent from leading business and design schools around the world to solve a challenge in business design.

The multidisciplinary team, dubbed Revolution, included Stef Geiger (MBA 2015), Christine Kim (MArch 2014), Jennifer Lee (Evening MBA 2016), Bhuvan Shrivastava (MBA 2015), and Justin Stepanowicz (Evening MBA 2016).Two other Daniels students, Craig Deebank (MArch 2014) Team: ID8, and Ian Mulder (MArch 2013), Team: New Wave Designers, also competed. Deebank's team received an honorable mention.

Kim says she and the other Daniels Faculty students were inspired to join the competition after completing a course in architectural entrepreneurship, taught by Associate Professor Steven Fong and Instructor Lorne Gertner. Offered in the fall, the course explores opportunities to merge design thinking with investment, retail, and service environments. A key objective of the course is to understand the role of design in addressing business opportunities and challenges.

Teams from U of T competed against teams from the Illinois Institute of Design, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, OCAD University, Copenhagen Business School, and the Kellogg School of Management, among others. The U.S. retail chain Target challenged students to imagine what retail will look like in 50 years and how will Target stay relevant.