The ESADE MBA Blog · ESADE Business School · Barcelona

Archive for the ‘Student clubs’ Category

Term 2 is challenging us so far. At least as much as you want to be challenged. Classes, readings and case preparations are a must for everyone, of course. Beyond this we have some case competitions going around. These are a good opportunity to put into practice the concepts learnt in class. There are competitions for Net Impact, Pharma, Sports Business, Marketing, Operations… i’ll let you know how we progress in those!

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

The ESADE Entrepreneurship Club is launching the coming Friday 21st of May, the first annual Quest for Talent event. The event consists of three parts, a business idea elevator pitch competition, a series of panelists and the core part which is a career fair of growth companies!! Among the invitees, MBAs from Europe’s top business schools and european growth companies.

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.

Besides the two classes we had yesterday, we somehow also managed to squeeze in three good speakers on campus.

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!

One of the most exciting things when you do an MBA are the opportunities outside of the classrooms. You can engage in sports or business clubs, go to different guest speakers, fairs etc. One of these things are case competitions that many MBA schools are hosting throughout a year.

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 …