2015 | Lorenzo Valacca:
MBA World Summit, great environment to make international friends, to explore other business schools cultures, and… to find potential partners for future projects!
Around one month before the 2015 Summit edition, I run into an intriguing competition organized by Financial Times: the FT MBA Challenge.
The purpose of the competition is to import business mindsets into the health issues in the underdeveloped country Uganda and to prepare a business plan to overcome these problems. I have thought on it as an interesting reminder of taking in consideration the impact of our projects on the society and on how we can use our learnings to improve the world. These simple concepts may be forgotten during business studies and they risk ending below other more material priorities.
Main registration requirement: three of the members should be MBA students at business schools in three different continents; requirement that may be quite tough when creating the team for who is out of the MBA World Summit context.
At the healthcare panel of the Summit, I had the pleasure to meet people with the desired characteristics: in love with the healthcare environment, proactive, with multicultural background, and willing to change the world.
I teamed up with two Summit attendees, adding classmates from our respective business schools on top.
We have been following up the project with ongoing Skype calls, hard to set because of the different time zones. These chats are very fun and productive at the same time: the brainstorming incorporates heterogeneous points of view and creative ideas that I am fascinated to listen and that would have been difficult to encounter without these global leaders as teammates. In conclusion, after having worked during the few spare time over the MBA workload we passed the qualification round and we have been selected as one of the six finalists. The winner will be selected in few weeks, so… cross the fingers for few MBA WS alumni!
