Archive for May/2010

In a network society, as individuals or organizations, we express our human and digital identity. The practice of story-telling abilities as a mean to communicate strategically & creatively is crucial as the world becomes smaller as a result of greater connectivity between information & opinions. With this mindset we encourage individuals to put in test their story-telling skills by answering one of these two questions:

“How should global corporations communicate with local bloggers?”

“How is the economic downturn affecting you community?”

These competitions will grant the two winners a publication of their submitted work & one scholarship of 60% to each one, applicable on tuition fees of the Master in Corporate Communication or the Master in Economics & Business Journalism from the IE School of Communication. You can choose the challenge that relates to the program of your interest & elaborate your view with blog entries of 500 words or a 10 minute video uploaded on YouTube.

Good luck!

Start date: 14^th of May 2010

End date: 20^th of June 2010 (at 24.00 CEST)

More details you can find on http://competition.mccmebj.ie.edu/

The Master in Global Environmental Change from the IE School of Biology is an innovative program with a unique focus. The Master will prepare students to translate the emerging insights about our changing living environment into understandable information to guide decision-makers in business, governments, and communities.

To celebrate this pioneering program, IE School of Biology will grant a publication of the winner’s submitted work & a scholarship of 60% of tuition fees of the Master. The competition tests your ability to communicate about environmental issues. Tell your story about how environmental change affects (or will affect) your living environment with twenty images. We are looking for a strong message without bells and whistles.

Submissions will be judged by a professional jury. Unleash your creativity and enter the competition!

Start date: 14^th of May 2010

End date: 20^th of June 2010 (at 24.00 CEST)

More details you can find on http://competition.mgec.ie.edu/.

The Pritzker-Hyatt scholarships, for the education of professionals in the world of Architecture, are directed toward students of IE University’s Bachelor in Architecture + Business.

The IE Foundation and Pritzker-Hyatt have signed an agreement, offering two scholarships to candidates that have successfully completed the admission process, therefore being admitted to the IE School of Architecture, for the fall 2010 intake. The goal of this agreement is to ensure that no economic reasons will interfere with candidates who have excellent potential from gaining access to IE University and helping us, at the same time, promote the entrepreneurial spirit, which is the foundation of social and economic development on both the national and international scopes.

Scholarship details:

• Two scholarships covering 80% of the cost of tuition, aimed at outstanding students that have been admitted to IE University’s Bachelor of Architecture + Business.
• Application Deadline:
  • July 15th, 2010

Please do not hesitate to contact the IE Financial Aid Office – María de Molina, 11 – 28006 Madrid, España, if you need clarification on any aspect of the scholarship, by calling +34 91 568 96 00 or by sending an email to financialaid@ie.edu.

If you need any further information, or would like to begin the IE University admission process, please call us at +34 921 412 428 or write to university@ie.edu.

Why switching your postgraduate plans just because of your recent promotion? Are you “scared” about distance learning or online programs just because they do not provide the same learning as in a full-time programs? 

Join the upcoming IE presentation about its online programs and the worldwide recognized blended learning methodology. Prof. Gamaliel Martinez will guide you through the online platform and will explain you how much more you can learn studying from your current residence at one of Europe’s leading business school.

Register and enjoy!!

IE Focus | By Jose Mari O’Kean, Professor at IE Business School

The economic crisis has taught us an important lesson, namely that increases in wealth have to be based on real business, not on rises in the price of financial assets.We now have different books and reports on the financial crisis and they all have one common denominator: our ignorance of what happened and the difficulty involved in predicting it.

But if we stop and think for a minute, we can perhaps see that we aren’t really so ignorant:

a)We know that the market is what works best, but it has its faults. Several of them led to this crisis, namely the lack of information and the low-level transparency of financial markets, the principal-agent problem in bank management, behaviour among brokers that gave rise to moral risk, and inappropriate choices made by savers regarding financial assets and by banks regarding mortgage borrowers.

b)For better or for worse, states have intervened to correct these faults in economies, but we have no regulators to correct the faults of the global economy.

c)We operate in a global environment and this has made it possible to channel savings from where they were made to where they were needed with relative ease. The appearance of an emerging country such as China, with a savings rate of more than 40% of its revenue and a current-account surplus of 6% of its GDP, has brought an influx of funds available for loans on global financial markets.

d)And the newest facet of this crisis is perhaps that a generalized mega-expansionary monetary policy has been put in place coupled with the controlled inflation of the prices of goods and services, but nobody thought to control the significant increases in price it brought to financial and real assets. Read more…

IE Business School is glad to invite you and the members of your network to join the sixth in a series of videoconferences titled Biotechnology Management Today, on Thursday, May 20th at 15:00 (Madrid local time) or 21:00 (Singapore local time).

Speaker
Carolina Aguilar – Neuromodulation’s Market Development Manager for Europe and Central Asia (ECA). Medtronic European Headquarters, Switzerland

Content
This conference will give an overview about how medical technology innovation will fundamentally transform health care delivery, providing new solutions that might have been considered science fiction just some years ago but that are quickly becoming the standard of care. It will focus on the barriers and drivers of the Medical Device industry compared to the Pharmaceutical industry explaining why the pace of the medical invention is accelerating leading to an extremely attractive market space.

Carolina Aguilar will also showcase one of these examples of medical innovation, covering the journey from pipeline to market of Medtronic Deep Brain Stimulation, a technology for which Medtronic has been recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in March 2010.

Bio
Since July 2008, Carolina Aguilar has been the Market Development Manager for Europe and Central Asia for Medtronic – the leader in medical technology providing lifelong solutions for people with chronic diseases. Her role covers the strategic analysis of the market conditions, prioritization of needs, development of strategic solutions and execution of tailored-made plans for a sustainable growth in the different countries of the European Union and Central Asia. Carolina holds a Pharmacy degree from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, a Master’s in Neurotoxicology from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in USA and an Executive MBA from the IE Business School in Madrid. After her early years of undertaking scientific research in the area of Neurosciences in USA, she successfully led the introduction of the Greek cosmetic company, APIVITA Natural Products, into the Spanish Market in her function as Country Manager. After this challenging business experience, she joined Medtronic Spain in June 2006, working as a Marketing Manager in the Neuromodulation department and moved on to Medtronic’s European headquarters in Switzerland in 2008 where she continues working today.  

Please confirm your attendance by sending an e-mail to mbmconferences@ie.edu. Upon confirmation we will send you the link to the open videoconference.

If you are unable to join this conference but wish to be kept informed of future open conferences, please let us know.

IE Focus | By Enrique Dans, Professor at IE Business School

Apple did it again. It focused everyone’s attention on the iPad launch, and it will be a success because it takes the best that tablets had to offer and adds the Apple touch.The world of technology has experienced another of those characteristic “cult of the apple” events, also known as the “field of distortion of reality”. Once again we saw how that high priest called Steve Jobs, thin and fragile after his liver transplant, hypnotised the world of technology from a stage, completely redefining, almost reinventing, an entire market segment. For several hours, searches on Twitter for the word “iPad” returned more than five thousand new results per minute, while devotees and critics eagerly followed the news via the several thousands of bloggers and journalists who were at the Yerba Buena Centre of San Francisco. Once again the mystical information system designed by the company worked its magic: a combination of obsessive secrecy seasoned with a few information leaks that were not confirmed until the moment of truth and a staging capable of creating a truly surprising level of expectation. 

Before the iPad, the world of mobile devices began with mobile telephones, continued with the so-called netbooks and ended with laptops, the category in which Apple´s sales reached their high. However, Apple had often snubbed the intermediate category of netbooks, which it referred to as small, limited computers that led to poor user experiences. As a result, Apple had a clear gap in its product range, a gap it has filled with a move that is strategically perfect. It offers a product that is familiar: after redefining mobile telephones with the iPhone and becoming the reference design, it has designed something that is simply a very big iPhone, something everyone who has ever had an iPhone in their hands knows how to use or, in the light of the company´s concept of usability, even if they have never held one. It is everything from a book or a magazine to a simple computer when used with a keyboard base.  Read more…

IE Focus | By Daisy Escobar, Professor at IE Business School

Toyota has been shaken to its very foundations by the mechanical faults detected in some of its models, but it has managed to react fast, with improvements that are reminiscent of its just-in-time breakthrough.A company with faulty products is nothing new. Situations in which the fault affects its products en masse are not quite so common, but the business annals now contain several notorious cases, some of which have been solved more successfully than others.

The problem is therefore not a new one. The difference lies in that it is happening to Toyota, the company renowned for manufacturing fault-free products, that demonstrated the cost of ´no quality´ and that continuously works to eliminate any kind of wastefulness. Indeed, the concept of faulty product is what the company focuses on most in order to eliminate it from its plants. Toyota invented the famous poka-yokes, the alarms and controls that warn of errors so that they can be corrected before they become faults, in other words, before they are found by customers.

The mechanical problem affecting the accelerator pedals on some of its models and the brake pedals on others has struck the very heart of Toyota´s ideology: its commitment to quality. The company has not had long to wait to feel the effects of the problem: more than ten million cars recalled for a service; around two million dollars in costs (estimated figure); and a somewhat tarnished image as far as its customers are concerned Read more…

Original published at Bangkok Post on May 4, 2010

Earlier this year, Patr Bhalakula, a talented young Thai pursuing a Master in Marketing Management degree at IE  Business School, and his team won the second prize in the Novartis Masterminds Challenge in Spain. 

The challenge is a competition involving the London Business School, IESE (Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa) Business School, Insead (Institut Europeen d’Administration des Affaires) Business School, Esade (Escuela Superior de Administracion y Direccion de Empresas) Business School and IE Business School. It aims to stimulate innovative approaches and raise interest in executing marketing plans for the pharmaceutical industry. More than 170 competitors of over 40 nationalities participated in the challenge.

“I wanted to find out if I could combine my marketing experience with what I learn here at IE Business School and apply the result to the real business world and to a sector I had little knowledge about previously,” said Patr, explaining the reason why he participated in the competition. Patr joined forces with two other students at the same institution, Kelly Fung and Leen Rimawi, to form the Challenger team. They were given the task of developing a marketing plan and converting Zelisar, Novartis’ hypertension medication launched in Spain last year, into a first-line treatment solution as well as suggesting recommendations to improve the health care system in Spain.

The final presentation was held at Novartis’ headquarters in Barcelona. The team won the first runner-up position and was awarded 4,000 euros (172,000 baht). The first prize went to the Beer View Marketers team from LBS. Patr admitted that he has no background in the pharmaceutical business. Before entering the postgraduate programme, he worked in the marketing department at Toyota Motor Corporation and Procter & Gamble in Thailand. “During the competition, the time management, the teamwork and everything had to be perfect. Teamwork is crucial. I guess the most enriching aspect of the challenge was working with my friends. Achieving something is always sweeter when it is the result of group effort,” he commented. “Our team members were the youngest in the competition and none of us had had previous experience in pharmaceuticals before. This, we thought, would surely be our weakest point. That is why we called our group ‘Challenger’. It was a real challenge from the start,” Patr said.

However, he disclosed that their perceived weak point turned out to be their strength. “One of the members of the panel [of judges] told us that our proposal was very fresh, innovative and different, probably because our ideas were ‘out of the box’ and because they did not have any experience in pharmaceuticals. He was impressed because he thought we were very young,” Patr explained.

When he completes his studies in December, Patr anticipates pursuing a career in Thailand in the field of brand management in consumer products, technological products or luxury products.

Join the upcoming IE presentations and meeting possibilities with one of Europe’s leading business schools next Monday and Tuesday in Jakarta.

On Monday, you can learn more about IE and our programs. On Tuesday you can join an Admissions Workshop as well as have individual profile assessments and clarify any doubts you might have related to the IE programs. Register and enjoy!