IMD has won the prestigious European Private Equity Case Competition for the last two years. This year three teams from IMD took up another challenge with a very different flavour.

They embarked on the three stage Zurich Enterprise Challenge announced by Project Firefly.

Today’s joint guest entry comes from two of the contenders: Indian Ishwinder Bawa and Manu Gupta.

Project Firefly was set up in 2012 to provide merit based platforms to students and recent graduates to deliberate and cooperate with each other and to interact with established industry leaders and thinkers. The Zurich Enterprise Challenge is one of the flagship events from Project Firefly. Through the three stages, it gives an opportunity to work with one of the world’s top insurance company and interact with its corporate clients to solve real life strategy and business challenges.

This was the first year when IMD teams participated in the Zurich Enterprise Challenge.

The first round had us evaluate the potential expansion risks and opportunities for an automobile company. Apart from an advanced risk management tool provided by Zurich Insurance Company Ltd, we had to delve into many corporate strategy and international business strategy frameworks, to address market and policy-related risks faced by firms. About 90 teams competed in round one from business schools across the world. With all the three teams getting through, IMD had a 100% success rate in making it to the next round of the competition.

The second phase had the top twenty teams assigned to ten partner companies of Zurich Insurance Company Ltd. This was a unique opportunity to work closely with these established enterprises and to advise them on key market challenges that they wanted addressed.

We heard back on the results of the second phase and two of the three IMD teams have qualified for the phase 3. The Project Firefly team and their academic review board will now review the entries and along with Zurich Insurance Company, will announce the top two teams shortly. These teams will get to travel to Edinburgh for the Global Risk Management Summit and will present their submissions to industry experts from all over the world.

We will leave this post unfinished as we look forward to the final result….

The two teams who qualified for phase 3

Ishwinder and Manu Gupta.

 

 

How do you decide if or when you should do an MBA? 2018 candidate, Joyce Tsuchiya Melo, writes today’s guest entry about her decision.

During my journey towards the IMD MBA, my coach asked me, “Who are you?” It was as if he knew that this was the question that had been looming in my mind for the last few months. I had also been dreading the answer! Continue reading “All you need is twenty seconds of courage” →