“Too bureaucratic” was the diagnosis of Charline, Ruben and Hendrik after their first contacts with the medical department at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). This was not news to Medical Director Sebastian Spencer, but what did surprise him was what our students managed to achieve in the next couple of months: “Their intense, honest approach resulted in a remarkable openness with our people. Their ‘batteries of change’ were like the boosters to launch a satellite.”

Three Masters students – Ortwin Huysmans, Robin Dehondt and Lynn Roodhooft – spent a month in Ethiopia supporting SNV, the Netherlands Development Organisation, in a project on gender relations. Under the supervision of Vlerick Professor Smaranda Boros and, locally, Sarah De Smet, they explored the complexity of gender equality in rural Ethiopia.

When Natasa Zivanovic and Ruben Vandenbulcke visited the Google offices in Brussels with their full-time MBA classmates, and heard what the Ghent-based machine learning company ML6 plans to do with artificial intelligence, they knew straight away: this was their chance to do an in-company project at the cutting edge of digital technology. After successfully pitching to ML6, they were asked to draw up a plan to bring the state-of-the-art ECC.AI product to the market.

“Spices Rwanda was still brand new, and we were just about to sow our first sustainable chilli pepper seeds when the market plummeted!” Jan Wolthers (Inclusive Trading Group) recalls. Fortunately, he had a great relationship with three Vlerick students. He decided to ask them how Spices Rwanda could still survive as a sustainable business.

Where will you find bankers, hypes, techies and ninjas? At Vlerick’s FinTech Boot Camp of course. Over three weeks, 50 Masters and MBA students took on roles from the financial services industry and shared their fintech expertise. They tackled challenges, shared their ideas with international industry experts and participated in real company assignments – and even visited London, one of the FinTech capitals of the world.

For the fifth year in a row, students at Vlerick Business School were given the unique opportunity to discover the digital world of Coca-Cola. Over a period of three weeks, they were challenged to think up digital solutions using their own experience of the world as the starting point. “During the Vlerick Boot Camp, we learned how international companies tackle digitalisation and were also given the chance to shape our own ideas”, was the verdict.

Ford Motor Company has recently announced its ambition to become a mobility company as well as an automotive company by extending its offerings to include new concepts and services that help to meet peoples’ future mobility needs. In this context Ford’s European Research and Innovation Center (RIC) in Aachen collaborated with three Masters students for an in-company project. Together with Mark Gijbels, Innovation Project Manager and University Alliance Manager at Ford RIC, our students look back on their project.

If you are a Masters in Financial Management student and you want to know what private equity is really all about, what better organisation could you choose to gain experience with than Gimv? When our chair partner Gimv came looking for two students to analyse their investment portfolio as an in-company project, Glenn Velle and Elynn Verhoeven didn’t have to think twice.

Cegeka is one of the biggest integrated ICT players in Belgium, providing services across Europe. “Digital disruption and digital transformation are changing our playing field significantly”, says Sales Manager Glenn Gielens. “Consultancy firms have started to offer hands-on technical ICT support and creative and web agencies are rushing into social media and online content management. Competition is tougher than it’s ever been. So how can we serve our clients best while maintaining, or even strengthening, our position in the market?” María Luisa Fernandez Vanoni, Hartmut Leidreiter and Yuki Takarada, three of our MBA students, took on the challenge of answering that question in their in-company project.

A shared passion for fashion brought three students from different backgrounds together during their Masters in Marketing Management. It led them to work together on their in-company project at Van de Velde lingerie where they carried out market research for the US market. And successfully, too. “I'm a very happy customer”, beams International Retail Director Yan Aerts.