Campus - 28.11.2014 - 00:00
3 December 2014. CEMS – The Global Alliance in Management Education, or CEMS for short, is the network of the world’s 29 leading business universities. Every spring semester in connection with their Management Master programme, more than 1,000 CEMS students advise the business school network’s economic partners. Complex assignments provide CEMS students with an opportunity to provide evidence of their analytical, methodological and cultural competencies. The CEMS business projects are evaluated by the students involved in the projects. An academic jury of the CEMS Alliance selects and nominates the Business Project of the Year.
Value creation with the help of digital systems
With the “Business Project of the Year: Digital ecosystem – an opportunity for profitable growth” for PricewaterhouseCoopers, CEMS students of the HSG developed ideas for the digital development of the consultancy firm. More and more enterprises such as Amazon, Apple and Google make use of digital systems in order to be able to offer more services themselves and thus to generate value creation. The consultancy team from the HSG examined the extent to which new digital offers impacted on certain industries, whether niche markets emerge and what market potentials this would create for PricewaterhouseCoopers.
With the CEMS Award in the category “Business Project of the Year: Digital ecosystem – an opportunity for profitable growth” for PricewaterhouseCoopers, the CEMS course at the HSG was awarded a prize for the third time. Furthermore, the University of St.Gallen achieved the highest evaluation status in the CEMS Master’s in Management in Spring Semester 2014 since the beginning of the evaluations.
Creative advice to students
A consultancy team is made up of five CEMS students from the HSG and from other CEMS universities. Each consultancy project is supported by an academic partner from the university and by a corporate representative. In the course of a semester, such a consultancy team invests more than 2,000 working hours. In the spring semester, the students worked out approaches to solutions to the challenges of AT Kearney, L’Oréal, PwC, SwissRe, UBS and Zurich Insurance Group.
The CEMS Alliance uses the St.Gallen CEMS business projects as a yardstick: a majority of the companies that were served by the consultancy teams rated the results as “excellent”. As a rule, proposals for solutions can be implemented at once. According to surveys, the companies greatly appreciate the student consultancy teams’ creativity, innovative spirit and commitment.
250 CEMS consultancy projects launched worldwide
The consultancy teams are frequently invited to the executive boards of CEMS corporate partners and commissioned to supervise the projects beyond the semester – or to present them again in a different country. Thanks to intensive cooperation for a number of weeks, CEMS students also often receive binding job offers.
No surprise, then, that the order books for the coming CEMS business projects are already full again after only a brief advertising spell. “It wasn’t always like this,” reminisces Jürgen Brücker, who together with Andreas Wittmer and his team has successfully launched more than 80 consultancy projects since 2004. However, the long time spent on establishing the projects has been worth it, as the effective network of all the partners of the CEMS Alliance demonstrates today.
Photo: CEMS students celebrate their Master’s degrees in Brussels.
Copyright: CEMS - The Global Alliance in Management Education
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