“Working on the solution of the tournament challenge I improved my English language and team working skills. Participation helped me better understand how people in US and Russia can communicate and collaborate inspired by an interesting task and common goal. Also I realized that I should learn to manage time better. All in all it was a great experience for me and I would like to continue participation in this project.” Alex Potapenko
“I've learnt a lot about how to develop a strategy. It was critical to understand how theory can be applied in order to achieve practical results. It was a beneficial experience to learn to work online using digital tools to collaborate with our American teammates. I improved my English language communication. And it was extremely interesting to work together on idea generation, and how important it is to listen and to respect the ideas of others.” Anna Litichevskaya
“The most important things I learned are: work hard, respect the opinions of your teammates, be competitive, be responsible, sociable and creative.” Alex Safronov
“My most important impressions are: the importance of listening to and respecting other people’s opinions, being proactive, responsible, sharing ideas and skills. It was a highly enriching experience, which brought me a breadth of knowledge.” Dasha Balashova
“Our participation in the online innovation tournament gave us opportunity to improve our English language skills, because we needed to discuss, share opinions and come to agreement about ideas related to special topics, using special term, trying to come up with innovative solutions to the challenge. It was a challenging and exciting experience – we are really grateful for this opportunity.” Arina Gizi, Sasha Chernyshova
“Participation in the online innovation tournament helped me learn important skills like teamwork, thinking fast to make decisions and achieve goals and the importance of punctuality. In addition I better understand the ways and instruments of product promotion, making products convenient and valuable for customers and profitable at the same time. One of the most important tings was to learn how to evaluate many ideas to select the best one.” Ildar Iskhakov
“Main things we understood through participation in the online innovation tournament were 1. how to work as an international team and achieve understanding and good teamwork with cooperate with our U.S. peers; 2. how to brainstorm, evaluate and select ideas using digital tools; 3. how to develop a solution to a challenging task under a tight deadline. Main skills we maintained through this experience were 1.development of viable business idea; 2. communication and collaboration focused on innovations; 3. teamwork related to an interesting and challenging task.” Ivan Osipov
“Participation in the online innovation tournament provided us an opportunity to learn by doing how to make products and services profitable, how to express ourselves and our ideas using digital tolls, and how to generate, evaluate and choose the winning idea. We learned important skills related to communication with peers overseas, teamwork, decision making and time management.” Alina Krylova
“Online innovation tournament was an excellent opportunity to practice teamwork, brainstorming ideas and decision making. It was interesting and exciting to work with our teammates to develop a solution under a tight deadline, communicate using digital tools, and learn to listen to others and respect their ideas and opinions and reach understanding and agreement in order to solve the challenge.” Svyatoslav Vygovsky, Nastya Turchina
“My team finds the challenge very good, was a very good test to see how we work together under pressure as a team and how can we can work to create an idea. I will recommend for the improvement of this challenge, first more time the death line was to close this is a problem that not only my team think that should be change but most of the team add problems with this too, an other improvement should be the that some professional should help us to understand better this challenge and help us to make some good marketing ideas for our idea. Other than that I belief that the challenge help to improve our team work”. Team # 3
“The challenge that took place on Dec, 17, 2015 was interesting. It really made us think it through and it was challenging coming up with just one idea. Especially with the short amount of time we had to complete it. We enjoyed it though, we like how we all had similar ideas so I guess great minds think alike. In the end it was a great little challenge and we are happy with the idea we came up with.” Team # 6
“The challenge is a great challenge and its well thought out, I just think that one and a half day to come up with a business is not that much time. A business should feel right and should feel like you made the right decision that’s my first concern. The second one is that I think this challenge falls in the hands of techs more then the business side because we are supposed to develop tools to put our business out there ,“online tools” like the challenge said, tool such as a easy to use website and a good structure is really important in a online business and that proves my point the business students have less of a work load than the actual techs as the workload is higher for us being techs we have to develop the main tools of the business. Especially due to the fact we have to design/create and finalize the website ourselves.” Team # 2
“The challenge wasn’t as difficult as I would of thought. One thing I liked was how we all gave ideas and actually came up with one big idea from there. If they would of gave us more time it would of been better, better as in maybe better results more ideas and communication. But it did work out well we all cooperated there were no NO’S, we all heard everyone out and then together came up with the solution.” Team # 5
“The project was on thinking what our team can sell and how we can advertise it. Our team came up with having a clothing line via web. Uploading your own picture of yourself and being able to transfer the clothes you like onto your picture, kind of like youre the model for the clothes, this way you can see how the clothes will look on you before you purchase them. It was a quite challenging project and I liked it, I like challenging things, its fun. But I do wish we could’ve had a bit more time because of the different hour we have from the our Russian peers. But overall I really liked this project and I really look forward for more to come.” Team # 7
“In my personal opinion the challenge was really fun and something new from which we got a lot of experience. I also belie that the instructions on the task should be a little more descriptive and/or maybe provide an example of what we are being asked to do, so we are clearer on what we are working on.” Team # 4