Some of Australasia’s brightest undergraduates descended on Queenstown for a business problem-solving competition last weekend.

It was the third edition of the Oceania Case Competition, which has been organised in Auckland for the past two years by Auckland Uni case programme director, Cameron Haworth.

This year, Otago Uni came onboard to co-host the comp and it was moved to Queenstown Resort College — the venue which used to host the International Case Competition between 2010 and 2017.

Fourteen teams of four — four from Auckland Uni, two from Otago Uni and eight from five Australian universities — tackled two real-world business cases over the two days.

One focused on an Otago Uni student’s sustainable fashion start-up and the other revolved around a Christchurch art business facing challenges to remain relevant.

A team from Melbourne’s Monash University won the competition trophy — a glammed-up pair of jandals.

The 15-person jury convenor was retired Otago Uni marketing lecturer John Guthrie, who used to run the Queenstown comp and was involved in sending NZ teams to overseas case comps.

At Sunday’s prizegiving, he told the students “I never am not impressed with what you guys can do”.

“The fact you can get a case about a company you’ve never heard of and you get five hours to go and do what you do [to address its issues], it’s just mind-blowing.

“And I think back to my student days and I think, ‘could I have done that?’

“And the answer is very quickly probably ‘no’.”

Haworth says he moved his event to Queenstown because as a student he had competed in one of the international case comps here, “and I have very fond memories of that”.

“We decided we wanted to do a collaboration with Auckland and Otago to try to bring back that form of event, but this time in a trans-Tasman setting rather than an international one.”

As for next year, “I guess we’ll have to go back and think about it and plan for it”.

“There’s a chance it might turn into a full international rather than a regional one.”

Which would certainly be a full-circle moment.

scoop@scene.co.nz