IMD MBA Schedule

Courses throughout the year are designed to give you an integrative overview not only of the core courses themselves, but also of how they work together.

The majority of classes are taught using the Case Study method, often with additional input from guest speakers who have ideally been involved in the case itself. Faculty encourage students to actively contribute to discussions so that you can provide examples from your own diverse experiences across functions, industries and geographies. Class participation is one component of your grade.

Teamwork also plays a strong role in course work, and for each module you will be assigned to a new group of 6 MBAs, where you will need to work together to complete assignments and produce presentations, while also completing individual work.

Competence in each subject is tested at each level and you need to pass all exams in order to continue with the program.
Integrative exercises are a traditional element of the program that combine your team skills and knowledge, giving you 48 hours to find solutions to an issue that covers multiple facets. An external jury will give you feedback and assess your success.

Hear more on how the integrative exercises impacted MBA alumna Liana Logiurato (MBA 1997).

More and more, big corporations are trying to harness the power of entrepreneurship. Leaders need to have the entrepreneurial drive and passion to adapt and respond to the digital revolution.

IMD was the first MBA program to integrate Entrepreneurship into the core curriculum, and the startup projects build on the knowledge you develop in the auditorium by exposing you to the real environment and mindset.

The course starts with an Introduction to Entrepreneurship and to Business Planning. How can you become a better venture capitalist? A better entrepreneur?

Working with case studies and a variety of entrepreneur guest speakers, you will also develop your understanding of the dilemma facing entrepreneurship in developing countries: sustainable development, managing the opportunity overload, prioritizing on the basis of the value chain and competitive advantages.

You will be introduced to your start-up projects and will work with them while you continue to develop your entrepreneurial mindset in class with topics such as Funding High Growth, High-Technology Companies and Contingent Valuations: Deal Contracting.

Working extensively with a wide range of case studies, you will explore entrepreneurship from a variety of angles including building a brand, financing growth, the fashion industry, managing growth globally, the ethics of business, managing luxury brands and harvesting the venture.

You will also address Emerging Market Entrepreneurship and develop an understanding of Lifestyle Entrepreneurship and Affinity Financing including entrepreneurial career tracks, managing the passion, finding the work / life balance, developing the sustainable value proposition, and operational excellence

Nurturing our strong links to EPFL, projects cover diverse sectors and issues, such as developing the market entry strategy for a biomedical product; fine-tuning the value system for a SAP service company; or empowering smallholder farmers in Ghana to create value via cocoa fruit’s untapped social, environmental, and culinary potential.

Over the course of the projects you will provide a total support to your selected startup of 500-600 work hours, an average of 6-8 hours each week.

Results

In the most recent Swiss Top 100 report, IMD-supported startups captured 39 of the 100 places, including 3 out of the top 10, and five of the top 25 scaleups!

Project Example: Rethinking Recycling

Having developed an innovative technology and with the momentum of a successful fundraising round and a demonstration plant under construction to scale the concept, this startup was ready to begin securing critical partnerships and to develop a market entry strategy.

The IMD team decided to make a “market entry toolkit”. First helping to identify strategic market entry points, then for each one, building a toolkit to help the company position itself to secure critical partnerships.

To identify strategic market entry points, the MBA team developed a set of criteria. They worked to piece together the supply chains of various industries, find relevant players, and understand the sources of power and influence. Through extensive research and numerous iterations of criteria assessment, they then narrowed down the most critical entry points and began constructing the market entry toolkits.

After three months of hard work, the team delivered a comprehensive presentation and detailed market entry strategy toolkits. Beyond the initial market entry, the presentation included strategic considerations for staging the plan, with insights on timing, priorities, and organizational complexities. The company was pleased with the deliverables and surprised by some of the new insights and data that the MBA team uncovered.

Project Example: Disrupting the Media and Broadcasting Industry

One of the major challenges our MBA team faced was to understand an industry in which none of us had any experience and its value chain. Founders having more than 80 years of professional experience had difficulty in simplifying how they see the world of broadcasting.

The original scope of the project was twofold: help the company to optimize their cloud computing costs (a large portion of their overall costs) and to do a simple competitive analysis for their main technological substitutes.

Research made it clear that there was an opportunity for the company to position their key technology in the sports and events space to exploit their main technological differentiator more fully.

To validate our strategy, we needed to complement our market study with a financial analysis. However, doing this for a startup is a far different challenge due to the amount of uncertainty that the revenue and cost projections are based on. Thus, we had to make it as flexible as possible without compromising its simplicity.

The last piece of the puzzle was predicting the money required for the seed funding round. This was not part of the original scope nor was is it in our initial plan. However, upon understanding the financials of the company we believed that it was crucial for them to understand how much money they would need to move to where they wanted to be in the next 3 years.

We now realize that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but it can be learned through experience. This project gave us a taste of the startup world and there’s yet much to learn about becoming an entrepreneur.

Project Example: A clothing retailer with a mission to do things differently

The startup company appeared to be well positioned – their products were sustainably sourced and fully recyclable. Their target: an ambitious growth plan, increasing sales significantly through all four of their headline brands, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 70%.

The scope of our project was to review and redefine the company’s value proposition within the premium end of the market and to identify a tangible action plan for improvement of the e-commerce website. As the project developed, the scope expanded to include developing an omni-channel presence and to identify key risks and mitigations to sustainable growth of the operations.

Research showed that many people who interacted with the brand did not fully understand the values or differentiate it from similar brands. It also confirmed the strength and value of two of the startup’s key differentiators: sustainability and Swiss-made.

The MBA team identified many possible improvement actions to aid the startup in their quest for growth, based on:

• A re-evaluation of the brand’s value proposition, based on market research compiled from survey data and benchmarking against key competitors.
• A detailed interview process which mapped the customer journey through the company’s e-commerce offering and identified key pain points and improvement opportunities.
• An analysis of the company’s social media offering, and investigation of additional physical and online marketplaces to enhance the number of touch points as part of a wider omnichannel strategy.
• A comprehensive risk management framework identifying mitigations to the most significant threats to the operations.

For a young startup, it is of course not possible to do everything. The challenge is to prioritise the highest value actions going forward. The sum total of the project was therefore distilled into a five-point implementable action plan which was presented to the company.

At IMD we attract diversity. This means that many of our applicants already have entrepreneurial experience, while others are thinking of their long term career path and planning to transition from the corporate world into their own venture. For some the stream will develop new approaches to challenges in large corporations, for others it can inspire new dreams.

Here are just a few examples of MBA alumni who have opted to work in the entrepreneurial world:

Serena Shamash, Kenyan (MBA 2007):
Eat Me – creating a restaurant business that inspires

Dan Perpich, American (MBA 2013):
Healthy produce gets a fresh start(up) for cold climates

Galina Antova, Bulgarian (MBA 2011):
Gender equality isn’t just a women’s issue, it’s a human one

Oliver Freiland, German (MBA 2009):
When the purest form of business is doing something on your own

Hans Petter Mellerud, Norwegian (MBA 1990):
IMD MBA alumnus wins EY Entrepreneur of the Year award

Bea Knecht, Swiss (MBA 1995):
Rewiring the brain to face the unexpected

Lara Pierce, American (MBA 2014):
CEO, Auris Tech Limited – Auris Tech is pioneering automatic speech recognition (ASR) for children. Our first consumerproduct will change the way children use their tablets and improve how this and future generations become strong and avid readers from an early age.

Matthew Costello, Australian/British (MBA 2017):
Co-Founder and CEO, Voyager – Voyager is a multi-party collaboration and workflow management solution for the bulk shippingvalue chain. We allow companies to work together in a single cloud based environment tocoordinate complex shipping operations, email free.

Ignacio Barrios, Spanish (MBA 2015):
Co-Founder and CEO, Kido Dynamics – Our team is dedicated to generating deep knowledge about the mobility behavior of millions of people through big data and machine learning technologies leveraged by the science of social physics.

Today, organizations live in an increasingly disruptive and fast-paced environment that requires continuous innovation. Companies that remain relevant in the long-term are those that never stop innovating.

During the one week MBA Innovation & Leadership Lab, you will focus on honing your capacity to come up with ideas that offer better solutions to the complex problems we face.

Design thinking is a discipline that will improve the quality of your innovation efforts. It will help you explore the world you live in to better decipher the problems that need to be solved; it will let you move from concrete observations to rapid prototyping and constant experimentations that will turn any interesting insight into a set of workable solutions.

A leader today needs a global awareness of innovation opportunities, technology, business models and environments.

The discovery expeditions allow you to discover and explore innovative hubs with the rest of your class. You will increase your global perspective and understand together how challenges and opportunities are shaping the future of business.

Objectives

• Address the risks of the largest business transformation of our time.
• Use learnings to reflect on the opportunities and challenges of innovation and globalization.
• Develop a point of view on how to make a positive impact.

Digital is changing our business environment. Today executives need to take bold – often irreversible – decisions on digital, such as establishing new businesses, reducing costs in traditional operations and making major platform investments.

However, while you are part of the most digitally savvy generation, we want to bring your understanding to a new level.

Our experience is that to make the right decisions you need to have some hands-on knowledge of programing and digital technologies. The Digital Analytics Lab is all about learning by doing.

Over one week, you will develop Python programming skills and put those skills into immediate practice as you complete a team assignment which will include Big Data, Machine Learning and AI.

Final results will be presented and the top teams selected by an external jury.

A leader today needs a global awareness of innovation opportunities, technology, business models and environments.

The discovery expeditions allow you to discover and explore innovative hubs with the rest of your class. You will increase your global perspective and understand together how challenges and opportunities are shaping the future of business.

Objectives

• Address the risks of the largest business transformation of our time.
• Use learnings to reflect on the opportunities and challenges of innovation and globalization.
• Develop a point of view on how to make a positive impact.

This is a critical part of your learning where you connect your new skills to practice in a global setting. It is an analytical and collaborative process, where each team is supported by a member of the Faculty to ensure you clearly set expectations with clients, plan your work appropriately and zoom in on the key issues.

IMD was the first MBA program ever to run International Consulting Projects. Since 1980, over 700 projects have been undertaken for 400 diverse companies worldwide.

Over seven-eight weeks, you help to resolve an issue being faced by a multinational, working with the top management in a team of 5-6. There are no classes during this time, so your focus is 100% on delivering results.

• Phase 1 : Outside-in Context analysis – key factors for success.
• Phase 2 : Company analysis – strategy context and value creation.
• Phase 3 : Issue analysis – recommendations.
• Phase 4 : Implementation design.

The funds generated from these projects keep expectations high and help source diversity for the following year’s program through the MBA Emerging Market Scholarships.

Interested in sponsoring an ICP project ? Please contact us.

Our dedicated Career Development team assists recruiters in identifying the best talent for their immediate and future business needs. They will also work closely with you as you focus on the first round of interviews, either on-campus, virtually or anywhere in the world.

We partner with companies from key industries, with diverse opportunities for our MBA graduates, while also encouraging you to use your own networks, those of your classmates and those of the entire IMD eco-system.

Your individual career advisor will continue to ensure that your job search strategy is on track and address any further issues or specific questions related to your search. Workshops will focus on the final stages of your recruitment, with topics such as salary negotiations.