Vestas sends Winnovation winners around the world
On 4 December 2009 Vestas awarded engineering master’s student Christopher Rowe from Newcastle University in Australia and MBA student Josie Fung from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada as the grand prize winners of the 2009 Winnovation competition. They each received a flight for two around the world. As an additional prize, Christopher was invited to shadow Vestas’ President of Technology R&D for a day.
Vestas, the world leader in wind energy solutions, hosted its second annual Winnovation competition this year on 3-4 December 2009 at Vestas’ cutting edge R&D facility in Aarhus, Denmark. The global competition was open to master’s students studying business or engineering. They were presented with a real Vestas business and engineering challenge and based on the creativity and viability of their solution, finalists were selected to participate in the final challenge in Denmark.
This year hundreds of applications were received by the 29 October deadline and from them 40 finalists from 13 countries were flown to Aarhus to compete for the grand prize. After two days of real Vestas business and engineering case challenges done in teams, the winners were announced—Christopher Rowe took top prize for the engineering category and Josie Fung won for business. The panel of 15 judges was impressed with all the participants. “I was very pleased to see the participant's passion and engagement working in multinational teams as well as the will to win which clearly is in line with Vestas values",” commented Finn Strom Madsen, President of Vestas Technology R&D and Winnovation judge.
As well as awarding two grand prize winners, three other participants are currently in discussions with Vestas about partnering for PhD research.
“Last year’s competition was a huge success,” describes Vestas’ Director of Employer Branding and event organizer Birgitte Brix Andersen. “We had applicants from all over the world and from them we selected 31 finalists to travel to Copenhagen to compete in the finals. Two winners were selected and two others were hired to work at Vestas. This year was an even bigger success with 40 finalists. We are very proud of the two winners and look forward to hiring some of the finalists to join us at Vestas,” continued Andersen.
The competition is set to take place again in the fall of 2010.
