Presentations of this year´s CEMS Business Projects

On April 30, the 26 CEMS students at NHH this semester, presented their Business Project reports with findings and analyses.

05.05.2014 - Tor Aase Johannessen

An important part of the CEMS Master in International Management programme is CEMS Business Projects. A business project is defined as "solving a real business problem for a company", and thus, ad hoc cases made up for this purpose are excluded.

Meetings with company representatives

The process to get Business Projects starts late in the autumn with discussions with relevant companies. Often, personal meetings with company representatives are necessary in order to explain the requirements for these projects, and to give feedback to project suggestions. "It´s a time consuming job", Tor Aase Johannessen, CEMS Academic director at NHH, says, but it´s also very rewarding when the companies express their satisfaction with the reports, and often say they are impressed with the academic level of the students.

Nine different business projects

This year, we succeeded in getting 9 BPs from extremely different companies. These were Transparency International, STATOIL, Deloitte, KPMG, Norwegian Red Cross, DNB, Lerøy Seafood, Haukeland University Hospital and L´Oréal. The projects this year varied from analysing the employees' satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with the office landscape in DNB´s new building in Bergen, to "Human resource strategies for business integrity - state of play and new frontiers" from Transparency International, and to "How to make the future outpatient clinic". Many of the project reports remain confidential, and cannot be exposed. After the presentations, the representatives from the companies present expressed their satisfaction with the reports, and some even told the students that they already had learned from the reports.

Hallvard Lerøy asked the CEMS-students to analyze a planned strategic change.

CEMS, our flagship

Sunniva Whittaker, Deputy Rector and responsible for international relations, says that the CEMS programme is our flagship, and the fact that the students have such diverse backgrounds, makes the programme particularly valuable.

CEMS - "The Global Alliance in Management" (formerly "Community of European Management Schools") - now comprises of 30 institutions worldwide, one in each country. Talks with schools in Africa and the US are underway, and will increase the number of member institutions further. In August, new CEMS students will start their semester at NHH with a "Block Seminar", this year entitled "Technology Transfer and Commercialization", with support from the European Space Agency (ESA) in the Netherlands, and Erasmus University in Rotterdam.