Surely you are witnessing the fact that in the last few years, our young mind, wherever it appears on some foreign competition, returns to us highly ranked and at best with some of the medals? This time we are talking about the entire organization of young and promising students, who in the very top of the world competition were positioned in the first 10.

You’ve heard well! Our BBICC (Belgrade Business International Case Competition), behind whose name is professor Vesna Damnjanovic and top talents from the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, have been hosting the prestigious competition in the case study for the seventh time in a row. But as far as we all enjoy the success of our youngest, we have to be grateful in one hand, and in the other responsible as a society towards that engagement and effort. We need to be support, and Saga New Frontier Group, as one of the strategic partners of the conference, undoubdetly is. In her three-decade career, she was always a support to young professionals and an inevitable station where experiences continued for the “silicon valley”; but not ours.

So this time, during the past seven days, 19 teams from renowned world universities and one domestic team have solved the tasks of strategic partners and left the biggest bite in the last 24 hours. Saga’s cognitive software platform, based on artificial intelligence, that is, the domestic product of the world’s caliber, which modernizes the way of communication, whose task is to bring together providers and users of services, the popular chatbot “Weaver”, was the topic about which the spear was for the first places. Beside Saga, strategic partnerships were provided by other IT companies, such as TeleGroup and Schneider Electric, as well as the world’s largest giant-brand Coca-Cola.

That this competition really has a unique character and weight testifies to the fact that the main motivation for these people is the challenge. They are not about rewards and anything in the material sense, but the uniqueness of the task they are working on, where they can expose themselves and their expertise to great testing. This requirement is definitely fulfilled by BBICC this year by choosing challenging topics, especially globally current in the field of information technologies, such as digital transformation and its leading followers, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The expert jury, consisting of representatives of the companies that were strategic partners, expert associates and deputy chairman of the Board of Directors of Raiffeisen Bank, Petar Jovanović, unanimously ranked the first three teams 1) Lazaridis School of Business and Economics, University of Wilfrid Laurier from Canada 2) FEP Economics and Management at Porto University, Portugal, and 3) John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, also from Canada.

• I am very pleased with our participation in this competition because we have received more than expected. The basic idea was to hear from young people their perspective on some of the business problems that are bothering us, and they gave us even more of it, because they were thinking completely beyond the limits often imposed by daily business. They were thinking as they themselves are, and this is like young people who are someone who will be the future and someone who will be the user to whom we care most. – said Nebojsa Bjelotomic, CEO of Saga.