EMBA projects: Opportunity to get to grips with a real-life issue
When Hans De Gusseme enrolled in 2002 on the EMBA at Shanghai’s China Europe International Business School (Ceibs), his employer and sponsoring company had a little local difficulty that it wanted him to help solve.
North of Shanghai at Suzhou is Picanol Suzhou Textile Machinery (PST), part of Belgian-based weaving machine maker Picanol. The factory had been making the same machine for about 10 years, says Mr De Gusseme: a product that was losing its competitiveness and “slowly dying”.
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PST needed a new strategy based around new products, and Mr De Gusseme’s main project on the EMBA was to find the answer. Using the tools learnt on the course, he did the market research, analysed what technologies customers needed and how much they would pay, and came up with a plan based around two new machines.
One of these, an airjet weaving machine, is already on the market, and Mr De Gusseme, who is now customer relationship team manager for Picanol in China, says the estimates in his project on pricing and specification were spot on. The only thing that slipped a bit, he says, was the timetable, showing that manufacturing realities cannot always be predicted accurately in an academic project.
EMBA projects such as Mr De Gusseme’s, stretching over as as much as a year of a two-year course and very often based on a specific business issue for the student’s sponsoring company, are considered a core part of the EMBA at most business schools, although there are some exceptions in the US (see sidebar).
Mel Foster’s project was very different. Her 18-month long EMBA at London Business School began in January 2005, and last autumn she did an elective on managing change, which she found to be one of the most interesting courses on the programme.
Ms Foster was working then in GlaxoSmithKline’s nutritional healthcare business, best known for its Ribena and Lucozade brands. The unit had developed a new strategy and changed its vision, she says, and after discussions with senior managers and her mentor at GSK
