UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of four Penn State Smeal College of Business students and another team member from the College of Information Sciences and Technology partnered to win the 2022 KPMG Ideation Challenge.

Haskel Canagarajah (third year – finance), Sean Cullen (third year – finance), Erica Mi (third year – information sciences and technology), Michael Mitole (third year – finance) and Gabriel Rodriguez (second year – master of accounting) emerged victorious after three rounds of increasingly intense competition.

The Penn State Smeal team finished ahead of Big Ten rivals from Michigan's Ross School of Business and Wisconsin-Madison's Foster School of Business.

Mitole, Canagarajah and Rodriguez are members of Smeal’s Sapphire Leadership Academic Program.

For Mitole, Mi, Cullen and Canagarajah, this is their seventh first-place finish in a case competition since their freshman year in 2019.

This year’s KPMG Ideation Challenge prompt was to come up with an innovative and disruptive solution to bring an industry or company toward carbon neutrality. The Penn State team designed a solution that tackled the pollutive, energy-wasting nature of the prison industry in the United States, while also addressing human rights abuses and poor living conditions that prisoners face.

Teams had to submit a video pitch of their solution, followed by a regional presentation and then a national presentation at KPMG Lakehouse in Lake Nona, Florida. Lakehouse is KPMG’s state-of-the-art facility where employees can collaborate, innovate and relax.

The Penn State team’s solution was so impressive that one of the judges, a principal in KPMG’s Data & Decision Science Team, requested a copy of the presentation to send to his colleagues in KPMG’s Infrastructure Criminal Justice Group.

The team will be flown to Copenhagen, Denmark, in June for the international round of the competition.