Instead of Ski Slopes, Sloan MBAs Off to Third World, Will Help Local Businesses Meet Local Needs.

Business/Education Editors

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 20, 2002

Instead of hitting the slopes and beaches for their winter break, more than 100 MIT Sloan MBA students will scatter across the globe in January, testing out business plans and models they spent the fall working on in their Cambridge classrooms. And rather than Western Europe or other developed regions to which business school students normally gravitate, these students will work with local businesses in lesser-developed nations.

The mid-semester internships with local entrepreneurs are part of an innovative and increasingly popular course at Sloan called the Global Entrepreneurship Laboratory. Better known as G-LAB, the curriculum offers students a chance to hone the entrepreneurial and technological skills they learn on campus while helping local businesses meet important local needs.

A measure of G-LAB's relevance is that additional Sloan student teams are now being organized to go to Argentina and Uruguay, both of which are facing serious economic problems. These students, many of them first year of MBAs, will have the opportunity to get out of the classroom to help established local businesses -- many of them low (if any) profit operations -- face local economic problems.

"Most of us want to be entrepreneurs ourselves, but this class also gives us a chance to make a positive impact in a non-industrial society," said Sam Epee-Bounya, MBA `03, an Ivory Coast native who will spend the month in Brazil working with a renewable energy firm signed up with G-LAB.

With only a semester in Cambridge and just a few weeks in their project nation, the students have to focus on what they can realistically achieve, Epee-Bounya said. "Rather than superficially cover a lot of areas, we try to make sure that we deliver something that is real and of value."

Often, that can mean exposing companies in lesser-developed nations to business systems, marketing approaches, technology, and other tools that may be old news to the Sloan MBAs, but not to the entrepreneurs. And it means direct exposure for the students to how classroom theory can often clash with on-the-ground reality.

"I had always worked within big conglomerates where cash is usually there for good ideas and sound recommendations," said Sloan alumnus Vicente Smith, whose G-LAB work was in Chile. "Crashing into a 200-square-foot office in Chile where ten kids were trying to launch new features of their product was very different from what I had seen before," he said. "Business reality in Chile proved slightly different from on-campus lessons, but those lessons were still very useful. Our perspectives gave those entrepreneurs the chance to lift up their heads and quickly take a look at what was happening outside their market boundaries. We provided benchmarks, market trends, best practices, and new business models that certainly made a difference in the way they see the business now."

It's also made a difference in how students apply their classroom lessons, said Prof. Richard Locke, one of the course's instructors. During the fall semester, the students prepare business plans, market analyses and models. Then, after their January internships, the class reviews the plans in order to deliver a revised plan to the company that reflects both campus and in-country lessons. During the spring term, representatives of the host businesses directly participate in the class, either traveling to Cambridge or connecting electronically to the G-LAB classroom.

"Our goal was to provide students with more than just models but with some real experiential learning around entrepreneurship," Locke said. "We came up with the idea of using (the semester break) for students to complete fulltime, two- to four-week internships. The hard sell wasn't getting students to agree to give up vacations - it turns out they're hungry for this kind of experience. The hard sell was to convince the companies, who maybe didn't even know about MIT or business schools, that we had something real and valuable to offer them."

The companies - and Sloan students - are now fully sold, said Prof. Simon Johnson, who also teaches G-LAB. "We now have too many companies that want to join the course," he said. And because of mounting student interest in the course, "we've raised the entry hurdle. There is a fairly stiff prerequisite that will get tougher over time. We want to make sure that students regard G-LAB as a very serious commitment. The companies deserve a serious effort. And everyone gains from that."

Sloan Senior Lecturer Ken Morse said G-LAB's lesser-developed nation focus fits into the broader work of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, of which he is managing director. "Our mission is to train the men and women who will make start-up companies successful," he said. "That means training people to be success in other environments as well." This is especially important at Sloan, where the student body is nearly 40% international.

Bobby Wilson, MBA '03, and his G-LAB student team will be in Nepal next month, seeking ways to implement a system for clean drinking water delivery.

"There are obviously limits to what you can accomplish in a three-week period, but we hope to at least set up a business relationship (with entrepreneurs in Nepal) that can continue in our absence," Wilson said. "For me personally, being on the ground like this is experience I can never pick up from a textbook. G-LAB gives us an opportunity to see how two thirds of the world lives. And that's something MBAs often don't see."