Flipping Finance Challenge yields several awards for Purdue Fort Wayne students

FORT WAYNE, Ind.—Three teams of students from Purdue University Fort Wayne’s Doermer School of Business recently spent 18 straight hours competing in the Indiana Bond Bank’s annual Flipping Finance Challenge, and two of those teams came away winners.

The Flipping Finance Challenge is a competition in which teams statewide compete against each other and for Hoosier communities. The goal is to “flip conventional municipal project financing on its head,” and come up with new solutions to finding funding for community projects.

The High Hoops team from Purdue Fort Wayne entered two challenges: one from the town of Sullivan in southern Indiana, the other from Knightstown; winning a first place from Sullivan and a second place from Knightstown.

The Sullivan town representatives want the financing plan to provide new amenities that would fit within the town park and lake grounds. High Hoops proposed making the park into an adventure attraction, with zip lines and tree houses. The plan also included adding a bike rental service with starting and ending points in the campgrounds and in downtown Sullivan. A third option to get more of the campers and lake enthusiasts to go to the downtown area would be turning a vacant building into an indoor food vendor plaza.

For Knightstown, the team tackled the lack of a grocery store in the east-central Indiana community. Their solutions, which earned the team second place, included adding a food cooperative and a mobile grocery van.

High Hoops team members included Quan Luong, Khoa Dang, Haemin Ryu, Trang Dao, An Nguyen, and Semir Kostic.

“The first and second place prizes were scored and awarded by each community based on solutions specific to their community,” said Brian Carman, director of marketing and business development for the Indiana Bond Bank. “They provided a scoring rubric that aided the innovators in designing their submission ahead of time. Submissions consisted of a short abstract and accompanying video detailing their solutions.”

The communities involved in the competition are selected by IBB through an open call to all units of government across Indiana. IBB then works with each community to identify the challenges that are most pressing, but also suitable for the event.

The people’s choice award was given to the Audit 1 team from Purdue Fort Wayne. Daniel Boylan, assistant professor of accounting, who led the teams in the competition, noted that was not an easy award to win because COVID-19 forced the competition online this year.

“All three of our teams were in the new lounge and large classroom area of the Richard T. Doermer School of Business building for the entire 18 hours of competition that began at 6 p.m. on a Friday and concluded the following afternoon,” said Boylan. “Just know, in an 18-hour competition, some masks ‘fell off.’ However, the rest of the teams voted Audit 1 as the popular winner as they were most diligent in wearing their masks.”

Members of the Audit 1 team included Sydney Boyd, Caitlyn Flory, Michael Perkins, Thaine Boehme, Niko Albertson, and Lucas Blevins.

The 19 teams in the competition were made up of more than 120 participants. The competitors did not know who the other teams were or who they may have been affiliated with.

“We don’t ask for affiliations, as many of our individual teams are not representing a company or university, but rather as a civic-minded individual volunteering their personal time,” said Carman. However, he did add “We attract innovators from all over the state with different backgrounds. So, we tend to get a lot of participation from students and professionals with expertise in marketing, entrepreneurialism, data, engineering, innovation, technology, and so on.”

For more information on the Purdue Fort Wayne teams, contact Boylan at 260-481-6464 or [email protected]. 

For more information on the competition itself, contact Carman at 317-233-0090 or [email protected].

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