My name is Ben B, and I am currently an MBA student at MIT-Sloan. Right now, I am preparing for my long trip overseas to New Zealand. I am one of four team members who have been working with an energy efficiency company in Auckland, NZ, which specializes in intelligent hot water controllers. We are helping them find a new market for them to enter.
This past semester we spent our time narrowing down a list of more than 200 markets around the world to just one that we are recommending for them. Once we get our “boots on the ground” in New Zealand, we will be working with senior management to come up with a detailed entry strategy for that market.
“I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.” ― Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
That has been the main conclusion of my team’s research so far for our G-Lab project – a pricing framework and market entry plan for Visenti which is a six-person start-up out of Singapore. Given my background in the water utility industry in California, I was not completely surprised. What has surprised me is that despite the bleak outlook of the water industry, several companies (like Visenti) have been successful in gaining pilots and even paying customers in the U.S. This is the main mystery that my team will try to solve during our time in Singapore. I am looking forward to my first start-up experience and my first professional experience in Asia.
You might be wondering what all of the above have in common. Well, the answer is simple. They're all going to be part of my daily life as I embark on my client site visit in beautiful Rio de Janeiro for GLAB.
Our client is a leading emerging market venture capital (EMVC) firm in Brazil that is focused on TMT (Technology, Media and Telecom) sectors. Their current portfolio consists of approximately 15 companies spanning everything from the Netflix of Brazil to the largest women's portal site in the country.
There are many ways you can define entrepreneurship. The most common way is when people refer to a start-up company in its early stages of growth. However, our G-Lab team faces a different kind of entrepreneurial challenge. Our client is one of the largest energy companies in Southeast Asia and is looking to revolutionize the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) business in that region. To give you a sense of our client’s size one of their long term goals is to be a Global Fortune 100 company in the next few years! So instead of the common definition of entrepreneurship, growing a small start up, we are trying to grow a new business in a very established corporate culture located in an emerging economic region, Southeast Asia.
Greetings from Detroit Metropolitan Airport! I just concluded a week in Michigan visiting my family, friends and old coworkers. It felt great to relax and catch up with everyone. Being back home always serves as a reminder of how lucky I am to be at MIT Sloan and how much my life has already changed. Now it's on to my next adventure - traveling the South Pacific!
It's 9 pm in New York JFK; flights are taking off and landing raucously as I pen this piece. Cheerful holiday music is playing through the public address system and the passengers and airport staff can be seen hustling about in christmasy attire.
Five hours ago I had faced a challenging problem. How does one pack for a 45 day road trip across 3 countries, 4 climate zones without overpacking yet ensuring that there are enough clothes to avoid embarrassment at the client site? You might think that this is a question straight out of an MIT problem set. But no! This is the one of the many interesting and sometimes offbeat challenges posed by the GLAB experience!
Visas checked. Air tickets checked. Vaccinations checked. I even got the high-altitude sickness pills from MIT medical center. Now I am officially READY for the G-lab onsite work!
In contrast to the craziness during finals, quietness dominates the Sloan buildings right now. Most of the Sloanies are home or one the way home, before departing for different part of the world.
My teammates and I just got off a call with a partner of a production studio consulting firm. It is hard to believe that we have worked on this project for three months since our first client conference call in September. We are working for Oruga (http://oruga.sc102.info/en/project/grid/video/studio), a talented animation start-up based in Bogota, to help define its U.S. market entry strategy. And it has been an amazing journey.
