We are proud to announce that two Deree students, Ioanna Kylakou, a senior majoring in Shipping Management, and Andreas Angelos Skondras, who just completed the Minor in Leadership and Management were, with their teams, among the 13 winners of the X-Culture competition’s Best Team Award of the 2022-23 round. In total, 1,289 teams participated in this round’s competition comprising a total of 6,189 students from 140 universities in 43 countries on six continents! As members of the winning teams, Ioanna and Andreas will be invited to the upcoming 2023 X-Culture Symposium.
X-Culture is an established international collaboration coordinated by Dr. Vas Taras at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro that runs for more than 10 years and aims at helping students develop the skills needed to function effectively as international business professionals in a global, multicultural world. So far, more than 66,000 students from more than 650 universities from more than 100 countries have participated in X-Culture.
In the X-Culture project, student teams are presented with international business challenges commissioned by real companies from all over the world and develop a solution to one of these challenges. At the end of the project, the teams present their solutions in the form of team reports. Ioanna and her team developed a solution for SkiBig3, a joint venture between three ski resorts in Canada, and Andreas and his team developed a solution for Gárne, a clothing company from Ukraine. Both Ioanna and Andreas were team leaders.
The evaluation process of the X-Culture competition was rigorous involving at a first level the independent evaluations of the instructors of the students in each team along multiple dimensions, such as report creativity, clarity, the viability of the ideas, style, as well as evaluation of each report section. At a second level, the 100 best reports with nearly perfect scores were selected and sent for additional evaluation to the X-Culture International Award Committee comprised of 31 International Business experts representing 22 different countries.
Deree-The American College of Greece and the School of Business and Economics participated in the X-Culture project for the first time in the fall 2022 semester through the course IB 4168 Cross-Cultural Management, offered by the Management and International Business Department and taught by Dr. Antonis Klidas, Head of the Management and International Business department. According to X-Culture, this was the first-ever participation from Greece! Participation in X-Culture was supported financially by the School of Business and Economics.
The Cross-Cultural Management course aims at helping students develop or enhance students global business skills and their cross-cultural competence, i.e., their ability to interact with individuals from different cultures effectively. Participation in the X-Culture project is a required assessment component of the course. The class of Fall 2022 did exceptionally well in the X-Culture competition. 10 out of the 15 students attending the class received an invitation from X-Culture to participate in their Coaching Program. Such invitations were extended to students who successfully completed the X-Culture Project, had high peer evaluations, scored high on the cultural and emotional intelligence tests, showed leadership and creativity, and met all deadlines. During the final class of the course, students received official certificates of participation in X-Culture, which Dean Annie Triantafillou awarded to the students.
Congratulations to Ioanna and Andreas, Best Team Award winners of the 2022-23 round of the X-Culture Competition!
Ioanna and Andreas, we are proud of you!