The IMD MBA is known for providing participants with novel experiences and learning opportunities to challenge and develop themselves. From the beginning, we are put into groups and required to collaborate for every course. The entrepreneurship stream comes with a little extra touch of anticipation as it entails working closely with a start-up venture and its entrepreneurs. The project is designed for us to be immersed into the lives of entrepreneurs, and learn from their incessant challenges as they navigate uncertainty every day.
Our team has partnered up with Pexapark, a company aiming to be the leading renewable energy sales platform in a rapidly transitioning energy landscape. We had the chance to discover the energy market of tomorrow while discussing PPAs over the past three months. But what is a PPA you might ask? Funnily enough, most of us had no clue three months ago. A PPA is a Power Purchase Agreement, in very simple terms, a contractual agreement for delivering specific amounts of electricity at a given price from a producer to an off-taker for a certain timeframe.
The intriguing aurora of the entrepreneurial spirit has sparked our solution-oriented mindset which quickly showed us the true reasons why the start-up experience is so valuable to our learning. With no clear line to follow and the weeks ahead looking like a winding path in thick fog, we quickly had to structure our thoughts, map out our way forward and pursue a plan. By adapting to the evolving challenges and discoveries, we learned to understand the possibilities for the business and the major potential it possesses, and kept coming back to the drawing board to revise our plan in light of these new discoveries.
We are now in the last phase of tying it all together. We will soon be presenting our findings to a jury of venture capitalists and a subsequent presentation to the start-up itself. While our start-up journey might be ending in a few days, the journey for Pexapark is still in flight. As they soar higher and spread their wings, we will feel that we are soaring with them.
The Pexapark MBA team: Philip Svendsen, Ricardo Martin Ruenes, Lola Jamous, Atul Kumar, Aurore Amaudruz, Andrey Belykh
