Professor of Business Strategy at Tepper, Prof Jeff Williams was one of the professors who held special classes for the 1st year students who were participating in Firenze. When asked on the value that Firenze was having on the participating students he said --
"The biggest value added for the participants of the case competition is their increased ability to structure a live business problem."

Commenting on the real-life business cases that Firenze thrives, he adds "They gain the experience of taking a fuzzy undefined set of problems and creating a systematic structure of recommendations. They also get used to answering problems where you may not have all the data you require or may have too much data - which is in generally the nature of business problems. Strategy, Marketing and Microeconomics classes help students build the necessary frameworks to solve such problems."

Echoing several of the recommendations we give the participating students, as have past year winners in several Firenze panels Prof Williams recommended that, "The best way students can add value is by thinking outside the box and considering creative solutions such as market redefinition, product repositioning and creative sourcing."

The quality of the student submissions clearly reflected the impact of some of the advice that he had to share with the students, and we thank the professor for that.