The SMU-X course “Business Consulting” is jointly offered by SMU and the University of St.Gallen. It is designed to allow students to translate classroom knowledge into professional experience. It is a unique oppor-tunity to learn more about consulting services and apply theoretical knowledge to a real business project. The core focus of this class rests on a group work built around a real world business project offered by one of our corpo-rarte partners. For each session (G1 and G2), we are collaborating with more than twelve different corporate partners with each student group benefitting from an exclusive relationship to their own corporate partner. The corporate projects cover different industries and different topics. Students are invited to share their preferences with which corporate partner (and thereby in which industry or on what topic focus) they wish to work and gain experience.
This SMU-X course is a combination of advanced in-class learning and practical interaction with the business world via project work and guest lecturers who work/have worked with major consultancy companies such as McKinsey, BCG, or Bain. The lectures introduce the world of consulting by teaching the basic steps and tools used during the consulting process. You will learn how consultants frame, analyse and solve problems and how they present their solutions to their clients. You will obtain tools and frameworks to reduce complexity and structure a project. Sev-eral mini cases and lived situations with your corporate partner will help you to develop an understanding of how to approach a business project and manage the relationship with your corporate partner as a client. Guest lectures will provide you with industry insights and hands-on experiences about the day-to-day business of a consultant.
The unique opportunity to explore, learn, and directly apply competencies in a real life, multidisciplinary, team-based consulting experience with a company/organization is the distinguishing feature of this course. You will be working in teams for (large) corporations or smaller startups, acting as student consultants working on real challenges the organizations presently face. The solutions you develop will be presented to the senior management of the compa-nies. In previous semesters, our corporate partners included DBS (banking), Adidas (sports apparel), WWF (nature conservancy), Nestlé (nutrition), SingPost (logistics), Lufthansa (airline), CapitaLand (real estate), Sygnum (fintech), Lazada (E-commerce) and many more.
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
• Formulate a clear-cut description of the problem a client wishes to address
• Frame the problem, break it down into sub-problems, and identify interdependencies
• Analyse the formulated problem by using an appropriate problem-solving approach
• Present and communicate their results to the clients
• Work in a multi-national and/or multi-cultural team, appreciating specific strength of each team member
• Interact with corporate representatives on a professional level
• Prepare a proposal that persuades a potential client to adopt it
• Understand how consultants use their expertise to win engagements