HUFS undergraduates Seo Yong-won (Business ’18), Lee Soo-hyun (Business ’19), Jeong Dream (Statistics ’17), and Jeong Soo-yeon (Economics ’18) won the first prize in the 16th Business Innovation Research Paper and Case Study Competition held by Korea Management Association Consulting (KMAC) on Dec. 8, 2020.

The purpose of the KMAC Competition is to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to think of new ideas and provide creative perspectives on business innovation that will lead Korea’s future and promote such insights to Korean industries and academia. About 70 research papers were submitted for the competition.

The HUFS undergraduates faced stiff competition from students from Seoul National University and KAIST Graduate School to earn their spot as the first-prize winner.

For five months, the HUFS students researched on how health food and front-of-package affect a brand’s sale. The research was lauded for covering a unique topic by domestic and foreign standards and for providing empirical research with academic, practical, and policy implications.

The students said could add creativity to their research since students from various majors from the Seoul and Global Campus worked together. In addition, they said they learned valuable lessons by using real data for analysis to test their hypothesis accordingly with the Korean domestic environment. They also commented they felt a sense of pride for contributing to business innovation for the Korean food industry.