Two groups of MBA students of the MIT Sloan School of Management, developed their professional practices in Argentinian companies during January.

Their professional experience prior becoming MBA students included investment or marketing consultancy in enterprises such as PwC, L’Oréal, American Express, Google and Amazon, among others.

Those who are interested in having an international career take the optional class of the Global Entrepreneurship Lab, one of the most requested courses of the MBA, where Argentinian projects are always involved.

On this occasion, the Argentinian companies that welcomed the students where the technology company for the healthcare services industry, Conexia, and the multimedia company, Grupo Vi-Da.

The program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology business school was started in 2000. Every year, the students must organize teams and choose one of the projects presented by firms from different countries.

They work to solve problems in critical areas such as strategic growth, entering new markets, pricing, marketing, benchmarking, financing, and financial strategy.

During the process, the students gain experience from the real world to create, develop and run young companies with diverse economic infrastructures, having under consideration the role of politics, culture and other non-economic variables.

Argentina tends to provide students with expertise in problem solving with little economic resources, in unstable business environments and changing rules, as well as a sample of how companies operate in emerging countries.

From a less academic point of view, the destination lures them because it is an opportunity of knowing a very different reality to the American one. This year, students spent a week traveling to El Calafate, the Iguazú Falls and Ushuaia. During their experience in Buenos Aires, they also enjoyed plenty of after office, going out with Argentinian coworkers and strolling through different neighborhoods.

“In addition to their professionalism, they provides us with a new perspective of our own business, and opportunities, improvements and new possibilities emerge”, described Eugenia Bascarán, product manager of Leamos.com, the website of Grupo Vi-Da.

Vi-Da is a multidisciplinary group lead by Viviana Zocco, an Argentinian businesswoman well-known globally for being awarded three Stevie Awards for Women in Business in 2016. The company has offices in Argentina, Mexico and the United States.

“I always say that companies have urgent problems and important problems. In management, you dedicate 98% of the time to urgent matters, while the important matters are postponed. Working with a group of people so highly qualified and coordinated is a way to address those matters that we cannot deal with”, said Luis Navas, CEO of Conexia.

After welcoming six groups of MBA students, the Argentinian businessmen is an expert host for MIT students. “As the admission to the MBA is becoming more and more competitive –only 6% of applicants are admitted-, I do notice that students are more and more clever, even though some may be more effective than others”, he added.

To participate, companies must be going through a strategic or operational inflection point, and several are ready to expand internationally. They present their case to the MIT in August and by September the business school arranges a placement process to assign a group to each project.

By mid-October 2016, Conexia and Grupo Vi-Da were elected due to their business models, growth potential and achievements.

From that date on, the teams started working remotely, having weekly meetings through videoconferences.

“As soon as we learnt we had been chosen, we started working together, and from the very first moment their contributions were very valuable”, recalled Bascarán.

During the on-site phase, in which teams spend three weeks in the company, interviewing workers, clients and prospects, it was quite notable how the group committed with the product. “They are very open to our needs”, she pointed out.

Conexia, connects the healthcare Ecosystem actors through an online platform to share information in real time, better coordinate services and accelerate decisions making processes.

This company is almost a subsidiary of G-Lab in Argentina. It is the sixth group of MBA students it welcomes, who have been a pool of talent that provide ideas for the company’s internationalization. Sheila Chheda, Anusha Paliwal, Ronnie Kangrong Sun and Bill Hong Zhang, worked with this purpose in Buenos Aires, strengthening the user’s experience in the platform, by implementing a reengineering of processes to better align the needs of customers and the goals of the company.

In the case of Grupo Vi-Da, the students -Lawrence Wei, Michelle Shih, Emily Ye and Jing Zhon- focused on the project Leamos, a subscription service for eBooks in Spanish that can be distributed regionally or globally.

The G-Lab group focused on attracting new users and on the possibility of expanding the website to the North American market.

Why did they chose this project among all the proposals that G-Lab offers? “We were looking for something that would be interesting for everyone, from the point of view of the product and the industry. We also wanted a product linked to the consumer, something tangible and were we could see the impact. And where our skills were directly transferable to help the company”, said Wei on behalf of the group that worked in Grupo Vi-Da.

“You need a new set of skills and a different mindset for a new market, and that is what we shall apply in our career”, defined a student.

“I believe that the most important thing for us was to be exposed to an international business environment, in a country were English is not the main language. You need to adjust your pace, your ways, basically adapt to a different culture. Understand that in other countries people may think different than you do”, said another MIT student.

After completing this project, the students have another semester ahead at school before getting their valuable degree.

Source: Iprofesional