Fungus-fibre cup plan wins international business contest | Otago ...

University of Otago Business School student Helena Langer says things were "hectic" when pulling together an international online team for the competition she entered and won. Photo by Peter McIntosh.

A University of Otago student's idea to replace 25 billion styrofoam cups with a biodegradable product grown from Oyster mushroom fungus filaments has won an international contest.

Business School student Helena Langer (21) of Dunedin, who is studying management for her bachelor of commerce degree, this week won the Global Leader Award at the ninth annual Global Enterprise Experience competition.

This targets development of future global leaders across cultures, time zones and differing levels of wealth.

Ms Langer became leader of "team 73" and was one of two New Zealanders, grouped with two students from Hong Kong and others from Columbia, Nigeria, Finland and Uganda, who put together a business proposal over three weeks, before judging in New Zealand.

While being "really excited" to participate in part of an international team for the first time, that was dulled on receiving the "dreadful email" announcing her as team leader.

"[However] I ventured out to start the journey as an international leader. I knew it was not going to be easy, but I didn't think it was going to be as hard as it was," she said in a work journal.

The New Zealand-initiated competition, with entries created and judged online, pitted students from 40 countries against one another, as they worked in 90 international teams of up to eight people each.

Each team had three weeks to meet online, choose a project, then research, design and write a business concept proposal for a profitable product or service to link developed and developing countries for mutual benefit.

Ms Langer's team's concept was to replace styrene-based styrofoam fast-food industry cups in the US with a biodegradable material.

It combined Oyster mushroom fungus grown in Colombia with sawdust and palm kernel pulp to produce and harvest mycelium (vegetative fungus filaments), which was moulded to produce the cups.

Ms Langer said the final week of the three was "really hectic", with long hours communicating with the team members around the world, getting consensus on issues and making final decisions.

"The experience taught me to be persistent through the hard times and keep on trying," she said.

Ms Langer understood winners of the business contest would at some point get the opportunity to pitch their ideas further.

The competition's sponsors were Victoria University, the University of Otago, the ANZ Bank and Unesco.

Overall, the university's Business School featured prominently in the awards, with University of Otago diploma for graduates (management) student Charlotte Baddeley also highly commended in the Global Leader Award.

Two other students were nominated for the Global Leader Award, fourth-year physical education and management student Matthew Johnson, and first-year management student Jennifer Bailey.

Otago also had three students, all in the International Student Exchange Programme, Nathalie Fahrni, of Switzerland, and Helene Matti and Sanna Magnusson, both of Sweden, in teams that received an ANZ highly commended team report award for producing one of the six best business reports.

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