CEMS honours HSG

9 December 2016. CEMS – The Global Alliance in Management Education, or CEMS for short, is the network of the world’s 30 leading business universities. In the context of their Master’s Programme in Management, more than 1,000 CEMS students advise the business partners of the business school network in the Spring Semester every year. Complex assignments provide CEMS students with an opportunity to prove their analytical, methodological and cultural competencies. The CEMS projects are evaluated by the students involved in the projects. An academic jury provided by the CEMS Alliance will then select and nominate the Business Project of the Year.

This year the CEMS Team at the HSG succeeded in obtaining maximum grades for three projects:

• "Bridging the gap: by collecting ABB best practices and incorporate these in global ABB standard in the Area of marketing and sales performance management" (conducted with ABB),
• "Future of Business – discovering future to strategic business shifts" (conducted with A.T. Kearney),
• "The gap between C-suit, middle management and custom in digital – a thought leadership focused on large Swiss-based companies" (conducted with PricewaterhouseCoopers).

With the CEMS award in the Business Project of the Year category, the HSG received awards for the fourth time.

Creative consultancy by students

Consultancy teams consist of five CEMS students from the HSG and other CEMS universities. Each consultancy project is supported by an academic partner from the university and the corporate representatives. In the course of a semester, a consultancy team invests more than 2,000 working hours. In the Spring Semester, students worked out approaches to solving the challenges of A.T. Kearney, L’Oréal, PwC, SwissRE, UBS and the Zurich Insurance Group. The CEMS business projects from St.Gallen serve the CEMS Alliance as a yardstick. All the business projects that were supervised at the University of St.Gallen in spring 2016 were awarded the maximum grade both by the academic partners and by the companies. Their immediately possible translation into practice and their academic stringency were of particular importance in this respect.

Project books well filled for next year

Last but not least: the books for the coming CEM business projects are already full, following a brief advertising period. The partners submitted 19 projects for Spring Semester 2017. Nine projects could be accepted for the approx. 45 students. "We didn’t always receive more projects than we needed," reminisces Dr. Andreas Wittmer, the new Academic Director. "We owe this to the many years of development work with the former Academic Director, Dr. Jürgen Brücker, to whom I would like to extend my cordial thanks on this occasion."