![[From left to right: Daniels Fund President & CEO Hanna Skandera, Ciaran Fitzgerald, Sophie O'Looney, David Carr, Adam Toland, and Ellen Joyce]](/assets/614647/400x/ethics_1st_place_winner_notre_dame_web.jpg)
How do you balance supporting innovation, complex ethical dilemmas, and commercial business success?
It might sound like a trick question, but this was exactly the dilemma faced by a team of four ESTEEM graduate students in the Daniels Fund National Ethics Case Competition. Current students David Carr, Ciaran Fitzgerald, Sophie O’Looney and Adam Toland, with mentorship from ESTEEM alum Ellen Joyce, presented a strong case that these objectives need not be in conflict, but can complement each other in a presentation at the national final in Denver earlier this month — and secured the grand prize of $120,000 in the process.
An initiative of the Daniels Fund, a foundation established by entrepreneur Bill Daniels, the competition challenges university students to tackle thorny ethical cases based around the commercial development of cutting-edge technologies. Students were evaluated on their ability to apply the Daniels Fund Ethics Principles of integrity, trust, accountability, transparency, fairness, respect, rule of law, and viability, while also presenting commercially feasible, free-market solutions. For ESTEEM students in particular, it presented the perfect opportunity to practice the art of being a “force for good” — a central tenet of this most unique and compelling graduate program.
“It’s very on brand for [ESTEEM] students,” Toland said of the competition’s appeal. “Because of its mission to be “a powerful means for doing good” in the world, Notre Dame attracts people who care and think about the world in a positive way, [who believe] you can do well by doing good, and [the competition] very much hammered that home,” Indeed, it is a sentiment echoed by ESTEEM alum Susie Lira-Gonzalez (ESTEEM Class of 2019), Director of Alumni Relations at the Daniels Fund, who identified the opportunity for current ESTEEM students and flagged it to her alma mater. A callout for essay entries was placed in the program’s Friday Update - a must-read for any ESTEEM student — where it fell into the laps of the ethically-minded students.
“It was probably [in a] September Friday Update, and I just marked it in my calendar, ‘apply’,” Carr said. “We just stumbled across it,” With a diverse set of backgrounds between them, but limited experience in tech ethics, the team sought guidance from Notre Dame Computer Science PhD student Ellen Joyce, who had not only graduated from ESTEEM herself in 2020, but taught a technical elective on the current state and future of generative AI to the current ESTEEM class.
“For the first round, they had to write an essay. Adam had been in my class, [so] he remembered my research had been on trustworthy AI,” she recalled. “[It was] super relevant to both my research and my previous startup, [...] I could see how the concepts of trustworthy AI really matched with the Daniels ethics principles.”
Weeks spent carefully crafting a well thought-out proposition for the use of AI in the education space earned them a place in the top 20 and a ticket to the semi-finals in Denver, where they faced off against competition from universities from across the country, including Clemson University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Colorado Boulder.
“There was a case study released in late February,” O’Looney explained. “It was an 18-page document going through a predictive analytics company and the potential partners that we had to delve into and analyze. On the back of that, we had to make the supporting visual [with our] recommendations for what the company should do.”
Parsing the case was no easy feat. Facing a quagmire of ethical dilemmas and business objectives, the team created their own custom framework to balance ethical principles and free market success, offering an interdisciplinary perspective that came naturally to the ESTEEM students: “We were very much able to see both sides, because we’re sitting in the middle [of technology and business],” Toland remarked.
Indeed, their unique entrepreneurial perspective and comprehensive approach may well have been the secret to their success. Joyce recalls focusing on how they could differentiate themselves from other teams, “bringing our own flavor and not just relying on the ethics principles, but enhancing them [...] At the end of the day, it’s a business, [so] we really tried to explore the entrepreneurship side of things.”
It was not just the entrepreneurial mindset that gave the students the edge, but the practical skills they have honed as innovators in ESTEEM. Their collective experience as student founders, in particular, is something that Carr felt enabled them to succeed in the competitive atmosphere: “As founders, we’re used to performing under that pressure. We love it. We were all [pulling from] that.”
Following a presentation of their recommendations to a panel of executives, the team was told that they would be progressing to the final stage of the competition. With a new Part B of the case released, they had just two hours to construct an entirely new pitch based on information that turned the case upside down.
“This is where [being in] ESTEEM really helped,” Fitzgerald explained. “Speed and decision-making really helped us here. Even though it was high stress, we laid out the facts, analyzed them, and [...] we didn’t really look back. We just decided to trust our gut, trust our work, and go with what we had put down on paper.”
As the team tore through the new information in two hours of high stress and high productivity, it was a moment of great pride for mentor Joyce. “I feel like they grew and developed so much just from doing it. I struggle to articulate how proud I am of them,” she said. “Especially when they got the Part B, relative to how they thought about it when they got Part A [...] That showed how much they had grown [..] They learned a lot, they grew so much, and I was just incredibly proud.”
Their efforts paid dividends and saw them awarded first place ahead of runners-up University of Colorado Boulder and the United States Air Force Academy. “These students demonstrated exactly what Bill Daniels, one of America’s legendary entrepreneurs, believed — that the most successful leaders are those who understand that ethical conduct and business success go hand in hand,” said Hanna Skandera, President and CEO of the Daniels Fund. “Their commitment to ethical decision-making was impressive and proved that a deep understanding of business ethics is a winning free-market strategy.”
Buoyed by their victory, the team returned to South Bend to finish out their semester in high spirits, reflecting on what O’Looney describes as “a great experience.”
“It wasn’t just about getting the right answer, it was about getting the answer you believe in, and justifying it,” Fitzgerald explained, citing the competition’s namesake as a major source of inspiration: “We believed in Bill Daniels, the stories were there [...] We could kind of follow that.”
As in business, it often takes a village, and the team expressed their thanks for those working behind the scenes to make the event possible. “The competition was incredibly well organized, everything was so well prepped [...] It was an absolute pleasure to participate,” Joyce explained. The team gave credit to members of the Notre Dame community that provided support throughout their journey — Ben Hoggan, Brett Beasley, Mark Bourgeois, and ESTEEM Executive Director David Murphy — with a special thank you to ESTEEM staff member Audrey Lewis, who ensured the team’s experience was as smooth as possible.
Speaking on behalf of ESTEEM faculty and students, Executive Director David Murphy said: “This award is a huge win on many levels – certainly for our students; congratulations to David, Sophie, Ciaran and Adam for their inspiring work and all-in commitment to grapple with something as important, complex and challenging as balancing ethical dilemmas with commercially feasible, technology-based solutions like AI. I also want to acknowledge and thank two of our ESTEEM alumni, Susie, who made sure we were aware of the inspiring and impactful mission and work of the Daniels Fund and the extraordinary opportunity this Challenge presented for our four ESTEEM graduate students and Ellen, who played such a key role in helping to mentor and advise our team of current ESTEEM students throughout the entire process. As a program and as a university focused and driven to be a powerful force for good in this world, we are both humbled and proud to have contributed to the ongoing legacy of Bill Daniels and his vision and, even a small way, to have created the kind of impact we hope to deliver at scale to a world so desperately in need.”
Equipped with ethical principles, sharp business acumen and technical expertise, the future looks bright for this team of students as they prepare to graduate ESTEEM this May and make their way as a “force for good” in the world.
About the ESTEEM Graduate Program:
Over the course of this 11-month Master of Science degree (in Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship) program at the University of Notre Dame, students from technical backgrounds are equipped with the skills and experience to launch new businesses, become innovators within large corporations, and be leaders of dynamic, innovative teams. Students are immersed in an entrepreneurial sandbox, where they get their hands dirty with entrepreneurship and innovation through a cutting-edge curriculum, a capstone commercialization project for an emerging technology, and outstanding out-of-the-classroom experiences.
To learn more about the ESTEEM Graduate Program or to apply, please visit the website.
Originally published by at esteem.nd.edu on April 28, 2025.