It is sometimes joked that a consultant is “someone who takes the watch from your wrist and tells you the time.” With IMD’s International Consulting Projects (ICPs), however, MBA participants are determined to prove otherwise – exploring practical, meaningful, non-trivial solutions for clients’ strategic issues, and drawing upon the multicultural, multi-disciplinary backgrounds of the team members as well as their IMD training. My ICP team, for example, includes multiple nationalities with professional backgrounds encompassing venture capital, healthcare, M&A, energy, logistics and pricing, law, and anthropology. Supported by Professor Carlos Cordon, we are exploring ways to drive growth in pharma/medtech for an innovative and dynamic cold chain logistics company.
“Cold chain” is a phrase used in business logistics to describe the process of transporting temperature-sensitive products such as food or medicine. As my ICP team has learned, this process involves a wide range of products and activities, from temperature monitors to storage facilities to predictive analytics. Leveraging research, interviews, and ideation, we are mapping the pharma/medtech ecosystems, helping our client gain a clearer understanding of what stakeholders value, both in absolute and relative terms, and delivering fresh, unbiased insights.
IMD’s ICPs are differentiated by practicality. Just as the MBA participants gain experiential, hands-on training, so too do companies benefit from in-depth analyses of strategic options and implementation plans. Accordingly, we have showed our client ways in which their industry ecosystem and potential client base includes players such as insurers, regulators, risk evaluators, venture capitalists, and startups as well as pharmaceutical companies, distributors, hospitals, and patients. Our ongoing research is clarifying both current pain points and future trends to help our client maximize its value propositions.
Two weeks remain in the ICP, and the next steps involve the development of specific go-to-market plans involving features and services that satisfy stakeholder needs. It is our hope that this process will accelerate our client’s execution of their strategic priorities and generate highly attractive returns.
