Join The Zurich Enterprise Challenge 2019

The Zurich Enterprise Challenge is a three-phase team competition designed to offer participating Masters, MBA or PhD students the opportunity to work directly with multinational corporations to provide real world solutions to existing corporate challenges.

• Phase 1 – Crack the Case:
  By solving a generic case study your team will be introduced to the Zurich Risk Room tool, learn how to use it and improve your understanding of risk analysis and management.


• Phase 2 – Partners Project:
  The top 20 teams will collaborate with a selected Zurich multinational corporate customer to provide a solution for a real-world corporate challenge.


• Phase 3 – The Summit:
  The winning team will present their solutions and recommendations to an audience of senior business executives attending the Zurich Global Risk Management Summit 2019.

• You will get the chance to solve real-world corporate challenges.
• You will have the opportunity to work with Zurich and one of their prestigious, multinational customers.  Companies, such as Syngenta, Kimberly-Clark, Lendlease, Philips, Kuehne + Nagel, Coca-Cola HBC, Nestlé, Mars, CBRE and other Fortune 500 companies have participated in the Challenge so far.
• You will have access to the Zurich Risk Room, an award-winning country risk assessment tool to support your risk analysis.
• You could be invited to attend and present at the Zurich Global Risk Management Summit.
• Your team could win a cash prize worth CHF 5’000.
• You could be invited for an interview with Zurich for a position.

• The Challenge is designed exclusively for enrolled Masters, MBA or PhD students from any university worldwide. Students graduating in 2019 are also eligible for the Challenge. Any student, independently of his/her area of studies, interested in management, finance, strategy and risk management is encouraged to participate.
• This is a team challenge for teams of 3-4 members. All participants are required to register a profile on the registration website. Multiple teams representing the same university can also join the Challenge.

• Registration for the 2019 challenge has now closed. We are no longer accepting registrations or submissions.
• Select your team members (3-4) and assign a team captain. The duties of the team captain will be to manage the communication with Zurich and submit your presentation. The team captain is required to register the team. Should you encounter technical difficulties please send your team registration to riskroom@zurich.com including a list of all team members and university names indicating who the team captain is and your team name.
• We encourage you to register as early as possible in order to receive any additional materials for Phase 1 as soon as possible.

• Phase 1:
  Your team has nine weeks from the announcement of the topic on Monday, March 04 to Sunday, May 05, 2019 in order to submit your solution to the case.
• Phase 2:
  If you qualify for Phase 2, your team will have 5 weeks to complete Phase 2, at a time to be agreed between June and August, 2019 depending on the availability of the Zurich customers’ representatives.
• Phase 3:
  If you qualify to attend the three-day Global Risk Management Summit in October, you should also account for sufficient time to travel to and from the conference. Prior to the conference you will work together with the Zurich team to facilitate your preparation for the conference.

• Phase 1:
  Submit a voice-over PowerPoint presentation that lasts a maximum of six minutes.
• Phase 2:
  Submit a PowerPoint presentation containing the analysis undertaken and your recommendation(s) to your partner company’s case study, including any necessary explanations, additional information and appendices. Your team’s presentation should be:
  • Prepared for an audience at company board level.
  • Appropriately structured so that it could be used in a 20 minute presentation.
  • In English.

Complete a live video conference which will include a 20-minute presentation and a 10-minute Q&A session with your partner company and Zurich. In exceptional circumstances, if the team is not able to attend a live video conference, they will be allowed to submit a pre-recorded video of their team presentation. However, in this case the teams will need to obtain prior approval from Zurich.

• Phase 3:
  While attending the Global Risk Management Summit your team will be given 15 minutes to present the most relevant aspects of your project to the global business executives in attendance.

• You will have to create a voice-over PowerPoint presentation.
• As the case study is generic and the involved company is fictional, you will be provided with the company's description and additional figures that could help you.
• The Zurich team has created a demo version of the Zurich Risk Room tool for you to deal with the specific case.
• An email with Phase 1 results will be sent to the team captain by May 20. Please make sure to add the email riskroom@zurich.com to your contacts, so that the email doesn’t end up in the spam box.

• The 20 best teams from Phase 1 will be invited to Phase 2 in order to work with one of Zurich’s multinational customers on solving a customer-specific case study.
• Your team will get full access to the Zurich Risk Room tool, used by risk management specialists around the world, in order to solve your case study.

• Phase 2 takes place over 5 weeks within the period of June to August. The Zurich team will do their best to accommodate the preferred 5-week window of each student team, however dates cannot be guaranteed and depend on the availability of key Challenge stakeholders of the team’s partner company.
• The Zurich team will match student teams with Zurich customers. Each Zurich customer will work with 2 teams, both teams will receive the same challenge question. All decisions made by Zurich and their participating customers will be final and binding.

• At the start of your 5-week period you will be given the case study from your partner company and access to the full Zurich Risk Room tool and support materials.
• Depending on the case provided by each Zurich customer, there may be additional material.
• Zurich customers reserve the right to ask teams to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

• The Zurich team will oversee all communications between teams and Zurich customers.
• Teams will interact with their assigned Zurich customer via scheduled conference calls and email correspondence (to be agreed with Zurich), no travelling or other expenses by the students will be required.

• Phase 2 results will be communicated by the Zurich team by September 02 at the latest.