Winning competitions is one of the proudest moments for business school students and staff. We take a closer look at one example. 

Mark Crowder, Reader and Faculty Competitions Lead, and Chiranjeewa Atapattu, Senior Lecturer and Faculty COIL Lead, both from the Faculty of Business and Law, Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, have co-authored the following blog, exploring a recent competition win in Cairo. 

Here are their words: 

Five Manchester Metropolitan University students have been named overall winners of the inaugural Vodafone Business Competition, held at Vodafone Egypt’s headquarters in Cairo. The result is more than a standalone victory: it is the culmination of a model that Manchester Met designed and built itself, and an indication of where international business education is heading.

Veron Charles, Isobel Jeffrie, Joseph McFadden, Aimee Mensah and Dylan Miller saw off teams from across the region to take the top prize. The delegation was coached by Dr Mark Crowder, whose leadership continues to strengthen the university’s standing in global competition.

A model built by Manchester Met, not borrowed

What set this competition apart was its origin. Manchester Met did not simply enter an existing event; it developed the underlying model directly. The contest grew out of the university’s Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) framework: the virtual, cross-border foundation through which staff and students first established the partnerships, shared briefs and international teams the competition would later depend on. With that groundwork laid online, the model converged into a face-to-face, industry-embedded final in Cairo.

The sequence was deliberate: virtual collaboration came first and built the infrastructure; the in-person competition followed as its natural next stage. It is a working demonstration of COIL maturing into something larger; a repeatable pipeline that moves students from screen-based collaboration to high-stakes, real-world delivery.  What was also key was the close involvement of a partner organisation, Vodafone, and collectively we worked over a period of several months to develop and refine our proposal into something concrete.

A real brief, solved under real constraints

The challenge centred on digital transformation and African expansion for Nile Home Care (NHC), one of Egypt’s leading FMCG manufacturers. Working to a brief grounded in genuine commercial pressures, the students diagnosed operational inefficiencies, designed a predictive maintenance strategy, recommended a suite of Vodafone Business technologies, and proposed a scalable platform capable of supporting NHC’s growth across Sub-Saharan Africa. Their solution paired rigorous analysis with practical, industry-ready innovation, and these were qualities that ultimately defined the winning entry.

Why it matters

The impact of a model like this reaches well beyond a single trophy. For students, it converts classroom theory into demonstrable capability: cross-cultural teamwork, client-facing communication, and the confidence to defend a strategy before industry judges, which are precisely the attributes employers value and rankings increasingly reward. For partners such as Vodafone and The American University in Cairo, it offers direct access to fresh talent and externally tested ideas.

For Manchester Met, it generates candid feedback from international markets that feeds back into the curriculum, and it deepens the institutional relationships on which sustainable internationalisation depends. And for the wider sector, it offers a credible template: a way to make international, applied learning structured and scalable rather than occasional and ad hoc.

What comes next

This was the inaugural edition and was, by design, a proof of concept. The intention now is to widen the field. We are already in discussion with Vodafone to broaden the competition to reflect a more global reach, extending participation beyond the founding partners and lifting the competition from a regional showcase to a genuinely world stage. As more universities, sponsors and markets are brought in, the model’s value compounds: a larger network, stiffer competition, richer industry briefs and stronger outcomes for the students at its centre.

Acknowledgements

The event was made possible through the exceptional support of colleagues at The American University in Cairo, including Doaa Tammam, Farida Mahgoub, Motaz Mannaa, Sarah Abo Hashem, Amira Amr, Amr GadelMawla, Adham Gadallah, Salma Amin Altelbany, Maha Mourad and Sara Ashraf. Particular thanks go to Chiranjeewa Atapattu and Dr Konstantia (Dina) Litsiou for their commitment to creating a high-value international learning experience.

Since January, Manchester Met students have secured two gold medals, three silver medals and a bronze across major international competitions.  This is a clear signal of a rapidly strengthening pipeline of globally minded, high-performing talent. Experiences like this demonstrate the transformative power of applied learning, industry partnership and international collaboration. With the model proven and momentum building, Manchester Met looks forward to scaling these opportunities and supporting even more students to excel on the global stage.

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