How does a cooling tower engineering company stay competitive in a fast-changing global market? “Thanks to this in-company project, Hamon now has a strategic view of the different sectors: which ones are easy for us to access, where we need to invest in new technologies or adapt to new regulations, and whether it’s profitable for us to do so.” Bernard Goblet, Hamon’s CEO at the time, and the three Masters in International Management & Strategy (MIMS) students involved, Sven, Nicolas and Louis, reflect on a project that took them to India and China.

Since 2015, Rode Kruis-Vlaanderen (Red Cross Flanders) has collaborated with Vlerick Business School to support its international capacity building programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Every year, a small group of Vlerick students is dispatched to one of the partner countries of Rode Kruis-Vlaanderen to work on a wide variety of different projects.
Despite the ongoing CoVID-19 crisis, this year was no exception. While the Vlerick team worked remotely, they were tasked with developing an evidence-based and contextualised Business Game to train the employees of various Commercial First Aid (CoFA) departments associated with the various African Red Cross Societies with whom Rode Kruis-Vlaanderen has a partnership. Our students happily explain how their In-Company Project came to life and how they brought it to a successful end…

How can we optimise our product pallets – preferably using automation? That was the challenge that Masters in General Management students Hannelore Houf and Charlotte De Vuyst – both supply chain newbies – took on for their in-company project at multinational Ontex. Good grades weren’t the only positive result of their efforts. “Our teams across various departments are now putting into practice the theoretical groundwork they laid over a two-month period.”

Masters in Innovation & Entrepreneurship students put together a business plan for medical wearables by Byteflies start-up

Only one-third of epilepsy patients are on the right medication. Thanks to Byteflies’ medical wearable, doctors have access to data that they can use to adjust medication. But how do you market this kind of device? That was the question that Vlerick students Bob and Arno tackled for their in-company project (ICP). The impact was greater than anyone expected…

“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.