HBS Preps 900 MBAs For A Massive Global Invasion

In January, teams of Harvard MBA students will descend on 12 cities in ten countries for an unprecedented global immersion experience

For the Harvard Business School, it is the academic equivalent of Operation Overlord.

Next month, the school that made the MBA one of the world’s most valuable credentials will launch an invasion of some 900 MBA students, roughly 20 professors and 40 staff members around the world as part of a new and highly ambitious week-long global immersion experience.

Some 152 six-student teams of Harvard MBAs will board airplanes bound for a dozen far-flung cities in 10 foreign countries that range from Argentina and Brazil to China and India. Once there, they’ll hook up with one of 140 organizations to create a new product or service for a developing market.

In Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, a team will help to create flood insurance that can be sold to locals. In China, another team will work to develop a new kind of automobile tire. In Ghana, students will work with L’Oreal to help the company redesign a hair product for the local market.

ARGUABLY THE BOLDEST EXPERIMENT EVER CARRIED OUT IN GRADUATE BUSINESS EDUCATION

The sheer scale of what Harvard is undertaking is astonishing. For the first time in its 103 year history, the school is shipping nearly an entire class of MBA students abroad, all at one time, in what will undoubtedly be the boldest experiment ever carried out in graduate business education. The goal: To equip Harvard MBAs for business in a global world.

Just the logistics of insuring that each team be in place, ready to go on Jan. 8, are mind-boggling: The school had to line up more than 150 meaningful projects with some 140 multinational companies, small businesses and non-profits. It had to process hundreds of visas, arrange air travel and hotel accommodations for nearly 1,000 travelers to locales as varied as Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo, Accra and Cape Town, Ho Chi Minh City and Istanbul, Chongqing and Shanghai, Mumbai and Chennai.

At one point, Harvard University’s new innovation lab was turned into an immunization clinic to vaccinate hundreds of students over three days. A car and driver had to be hired for each student team—and Harvard screened and then trained the drivers to ensure they could speak English and efficiently transport the teams to different locations for on-the-ground research.

Before booking accommodations, Harvard staffers were dispatched to each hotel to test the reliability of its Internet service and find backups in case something goes amiss. Video crews are being sent to at least three locations to film the student teams in action, interviewing potential customers on city streets and malls, working with local managers and executives, and ultimately creating a product or service that can be put into the marketplace. Because not all of the 907 first-year students could travel, Harvard had to set up a pair of projects in Boston.

‘IF WE ARE GOING TO BECOME GLOBAL, WE HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO DO THIS AND DO IT BY SCALE’

“The amount of planning as been extraordinary,” says Youngme Moon, a marketing professor who is chair of Harvard’s MBA program. “But this is HBS so we feel there is an expectation of quality, consistency and reliability. If we are truly going to become a global organization, we have to learn how to do this and do it by scale.”

If the experience is truly transformative for the students, it has already been so for the school itself. To organize the effort, Harvard had to increase the size of its support staff for the MBA program by ten people. More importantly, Moon and her team had to call on HBS resources far removed from MBA program delivery, borrowing staff from executive education, external relations, and the school’s global research centers. Faculty across all the different disciplines from finance to marketing came together on this project. “We had to break down the silos and boundaries and work together as a school in a way we never had,” says Moon.

She uses a medical school analogy to explain why Harvard is going to all this trouble. “For decades medical schools have understood the benefits of sending their students into real hospitals where they can practice what they’ve learned in the classroom,” she says. “We wanted a set of partners around the world who would in a sense become our teaching hospitals.”

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