Exactly one month and one hour to graduation!

This was the message posted by one of my batch mates on our whatsapp group last week! I cannot believe this year has to come an end. The only stark reminder of the end has probably been the onset of winter cause the pace of activity in the last few months has not changed all that much. The last weeks had been all about travelling and working on our ICP Project, job search and contemplating about real life outside the IMD bubble.

Speaking of ICP, I was working with three of my classmates on a project which involved developing new payment and funding models for a biotech company. The company has been working on a new technology in the field of oncology and our project was to analyse other industries and bring those learnings to pharma. With three out of the four of us coming from a non-pharmaceutical background, this was challenging yet very exciting.  Reading about the innovative therapy was fascinating but what appalled me was the regulatory complexity and the time needed for an approved drug to reach the consumer. This  learning phase was followed by understanding the competitor dynamics and studying industry analogues. Over the next weeks, we could delve deeper into some of the business models which we started exploring during the first phase of the project. Ultimately we provided something we believe is tangible and could be used by the client to implement one of the proposed models. While we are not sure if this would come true, we do know that our work has sparked a lot of internal discussions and conversations within different teams for the client. All in all it was a great opportunity to apply what we learnt in the first part of the year but also to challenge ourselves by working in a completely different industry.

Another highlight of this week has been the CEO elective. We had sessions with Roche, Vodafone and Louis Dreyfus. The difference in industries, leadership styles and organizational focus of each of the companies made the presentations interesting and more so the Q+A very informative.

However, this week not only marked the end of our ICP but also our leadership lab. This last class where we provided feedback to each other was humbling and overwhelming. It was also a stark realization of the fact that this year has bought us together in more ways than I could have ever imagined. It felt like the end of a journey or maybe the beginning of a different one.  After all as the saying goes  “Ends are not bad things, they just mean that something else is about to begin. And there are many things that don’t really end, anyway, they just begin again in a new way”.

On that note I leave you with a picture of my ICP team. Till the next time..

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From the left: Sathappan Sathappan,Prof James Henderson, Priyanka Chandran, Anton Moskalenko and Rahul Adhyapok

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