A team of 4 first-year MBA students were finalists in Price Chopper’s Ultimate Innovation Challenge conducted by Golub/Price Chopper Supermarkets, a leader in Northeast U.S. supermarket retailing.
FRONT ROW (l-r): Chinwe Egboh MBA '10; Internet Marketing Professor Jason Kuruzovich; Lily Zhou Pathfinder MBA '11; BACK ROW: Doyeon Lee MBA '10; Ming-Chih Chung MBA '10
The Innovation Challenge Competition sought innovative ideas focusing on four supermarket-related industry categories: Retail Operations, Supply Chain/Distribution Management, Merchandising/Marketing, or Human Resources.
Of the 30 entries, 7 teams were selected to pitch their ideas to senior management on the Price Chopper campus. The Lally team-- Ming-Chih Chung MBA ’10, Chinwe Egboh MBA ’10, Doyeon Lee MBA ’10, and Lily Zhou Pathfinder MBA ’11--proposed a virtual, paperless couponing system centered around 
implementation of a QR (“Quick Response”) code scanner, an advanced type of barcode scanner, which can transmit much more information than traditional bar codes.
The team found that while many shoppers were willing to use coupons, very few actually clipped and carried paper coupons to the supermarket. Under the proposed system, codes for the new electronic “virtual coupons” could be downloaded into a mobile device, such as shoppers’ cell phones. Shoppers could obtain codes via a multimedia message subscription service, from traditional newspaper and in-store circulars, or from the PriceChopper website. The codes could then be scanned at the supermarket checkout directly from the shopper’s cell phone. The team developed the proposal as part of Lally’s new Internet Marketing class, taught by Professor Jason Kuruzovich.
Ming-Chih Chung shared how the Lally team developed its concept: “We came up with this idea because 3 of our team members come from Asia, where QR technology is widely used. Also, I had work experience in a mobile content company, where I first learned this technology. We first came up with the QR concept, and then considered how we could utilize it to benefit both Price Chopper and its customers under the marketing aspect of the competition. Then we had a virtual coupon idea, which we used as our basis for this project.”
Lily Zhou acknowledged the help the team received from their faculty advisor: “Two days before our presentation for Price Chopper, we pre-presented to our professor, Jason Kuruzovich, after class to get some advice. The objective and insightful 
suggestions from our professor played a vital role in the success of our final presentation.”
Professor Kuruzovich noted, “I am very proud of the hard work and dedication to the proposal that the team showed. They did a great job of using technology and finding a way to help Price Chopper to reach their customers, which is the key objective of the course.”