ESADE Business School is a globally oriented and diverse academic institution with over 50 years’ experience in management training. As central features of ESADE’s culture, research and innovation are part of ESADE’s identity and quest for continuous improvement.

The Innovation Summit kicked off with keynote speaker Wim Vanhaverbeke, sitting professor of “Open Innovation” at ESADE and the Vlerick Leuven Gent School of Management (Belgium). As a leading expert in Open Innovation, he is also the co-editor (with Henry Chesbrough and Joel West) of “Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm“, a new book about the research challenges related to Open Innovation (Oxford University Press 2006; paperback in 2008; Japanese translation 2008).

Watch this video for a taster of the event which proved to be a great success.

To begin with, adidas presented a couple of months ago its competition called Route 2015. 7 teams from ESADE convinced the judges to reach the final to happen in 2 weeks time. We all will be supporting them. Furthermore, this weekend a team from ESADE is in London for the Hult Global Case Challenge to identify solutions to the global clean water crisis, in partnership with Water.org. They have presented this morning and we are waiting for news from them. Finally, three teams from ESADE will compete to reach the final of the Aspen Case Competition to be hosted in New York City.

On the other hand, the sports teams will compete and have fun with other business school thanks to IESE Spring Games in Barcelona, at the end of March.

I cannot forget the three Full time Students participating in the Barcelona Marathon tomorrow. They are part of the ESADE running Team.

Finally, the Sports Business Club will participate in the Global Sports Forum (www.globalsportsforum.com) to assess the organization on how to improve the event for the 2012 edition.

As you can see, a lot of things to feel proud of being part of the ESADE MBA community.

Have a nice weekend!

Raül

On the other hand, over the last weeks I have been the buddy of Oriol, a catalan living in the US who will be part of the MBA Class of 2013. The idea is to share doubts and interests about the life of a “esadian”. For me it was very useful one year ago so I hope it is useful for Oriol also!

This sunday is the deadline for the first round of the adidas case competition. Others are participating in Novartis one, one related to access to water… as usual a lot of life!

Enjoy your weekend! Some esadians will attend the calçotada thanks to ESADE MBASA Social affairs committee… yummy!

Raül

To begin with, last Wednesday I attended a presentation by Shlom Ben Ali (exminister of Israel). He was at ESADE thanks to Javier Solana (former general secretary of NATO) who is the current President of Global Geopolitics and Economy of ESADE. Furthermore, the presentation was the third out of eight of the Global Economy and Geopolitics in the 21st Century programme I enroled. By the way, next month the presentation will be around Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I have talked a lot about clubs so far. However, I want to remark two events, one happening this week and the other during next one. On one hand, yesterday Octagon came on campus, thanks to Sports Business Club, to talk about the company and the creation of beach soccer as business model and trademark. On the other hand, Mobile World Congress shows in Barcelona the trends of its sector and the Technology Club will be both in the venue leading a viability study for the GSMA and on campus with a very special event.  I can also explain you the Net Impact extended board challenges in the social sector and the proposals from Consulting Club to get internships.

As usual, a lot more to come

Raül

Furthermore, this week the ESADE runing team will wear the new official t-shirt for the first time. It will be in the Cursa de Sant Antoni, a 10 K race in Barcelona. Next week some of us will also participate in the half marathon of Barcelona.

And last but not least, during two days of the next week some companies will come for the Winter Career Forum. This is a good opportunity to know them and also to meet with its representatives during the networking events.

Enjoy your weekend!

Raül

In the elevator pitch competition, competitors will have 2 minutes to communicate their business idea. The three best ideas will share prizes which total in 4000 euros!

The panelists will discuss issues that concern growth firms, especially in the high tech sectors.

Last but not least, the career fair is meant to create new job opportunities for MBAs and bring growth companies in contact with top talent!

The entrepreneurship club board has worked very hard with a lot of passion for this event, aiming to help fellow classmates and boost ESADE’s reputation. There has been a lot of interest in this initiative, which allowed us to attract sponsors such as La Caixa and one of Barcelona’s most important business incubators, “Barcelona Activa”. For more information feel free to check entrepreneurship.esadembasa.com.

In our entrepreneurship class, Christopher Pommerening, Partner at Barcelona Venture Capital Fund and serial entrepreneur talked about his experiences and gave us great feedback on the business ideas we pitched to our class.

Just before that the ESADE Media Club brought in the Senior Manager for Strategy&Planning for Yahoo! Europe. In a one and a half hour session he covered a lot of ground talking about the online media industry, valuation of online businesses and the strategic challenges Yahoo! is facing.

In the evening, marketing club, brought in the head of Marketing & Sales of the Italian sports goods manufacturer Tecnica. In a another one and a half hour we learned about Tecnica’s multi-brand approach and positioning strategy in the exciting sports sector. All in all a pretty cool day and many thanks to all my colleagues at the clubs working hard to get these speakers on campus!

Three friends and I made a spontaneous decision to participate in the Georgetown Strategy Worldcup when we had lunch together out on the ESADE terrace one day. A week later we received the case prompt for the first round. It was about Germany’s planned subvention for the Opel/Magna deal and how Daimler should react to these plans. The case reflected the emphasis of the competition – combining strategic decisions with public policy issues. Some days after submitting our presentation we received the good news that we were selected as one of 5 teams (out of 29 initially) that was invited to Washington DC to participate in the final round.

With this invitation we also received our new case prompt. We were to analyze the situation of GMO authorization (genetically modified organisms) in the EU with regards to changes that have recently been proposed by the European Commission. We started working on it right away and were quite startled by the complexity of the topic and by the huge amount of information out there.

We finally left Barcelona for Washington on Wednesday with the submission deadline just 18 hours away. It would be the quickest flight all of us ever had. 9 hours went by very quickly as we were frantically producing slides on the plane. We submitted just in time and had about a day to prepare our presentation. We finally presented on Friday, April 9th. We had 15 minutes, a real challenge to cover all we had prepared …

Luckily we were the third team to present, so we had the chance to see two other teams presenting after us. All of us were very impressed by the presentations of the other teams from Duke, NYU, University of Maryland and Georgetown. So it came as a little surprise to us, when at 4pm our team was announced the winner of the Georgetown Strategy Worldcup!

It honestly was an amazing experience. Working in a team of friends with complementing strength is really rewarding. We met a lot of new people, also because the Georgetown MBA was also so nice to invite us to their annual MBA formal Friday night. We partied hard and on top of that DC spoiled us with clear skies and some perfect spring days!  What a weekend …

Schoolwise, the two new subjects I prefer are Finance II and Strategy. I believe that understanding the principles of finance and risk valuation is key to becoming successful managers regardless the sector. I am very impressed with professor Luisa Alemani. Today we had our Finance II mid-term exam and most of the class showed a good understanding of the principles taught so far. Strategy professor Luis Vives is equally engaging. In his class we analyze business cases, comment on business decisions while taking into consideration all the various forces surrounding corporations. I am working with an Irish, Canadian, German, Mexican / American and another student whose number of nationalities, I don’t remember exactly…three of them were American / Polish / Dutch. In this term, we are obviously more organized and structured in the way we approach our workload. We all have to fit in our schedule the individual job search, so our time management is much more efficient compared to the previous term and duties are better distributed.

Next week some of us ESADE students will be part of the GSMA Mobile World Congress, the biggest mobile expo in the world, which takes place in Barcelona on an annual basis. This has been achieved thanks to the effort of the ESADE Technology Club and its president, student Daniel Helmhold. I am very excited about this event. More GSMA and club related news on my next post.

Hasta pronto!

Moltacte opened its doors in 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis and has managed to survive thanks to its founders’ steely commitment to the social mission.  ESADE professor Alfred Vernis introduced a group of us MBA students to Moltacte in the fall in order to discuss its need to validate and improve the economic aspects of its model and ensure sustainability.

Since then, we have entered into a formal consulting relationship with Moltacte and begun work on a business plan.  We (the students) are managing all aspects from start to finish, from people management to number crunching.  After establishing a good client relationship and clarifying our scope and deliverables, we designed the processes our team would use to complete the project.  Currently, we are implementing the research and assessment phase.

For me personally, Moltacte takes my learning from the classroom to the real world of social enterprise, where finding balance between the economic and social goals requires creativity and tough decisions, where people are the key to results, and where my new MBA tools are only as good as the quality of application.  It’s also a unique way to bond with truly impressive peers in the Net Impact club.