What An Innovation Buyer Brings To Strategy: Inside INSEAD’s Master Strategist Day

It was late on a Tuesday night in October. In one of INSEAD‘s breakout rooms, my team landed on the idea that would take us to the final of the Master Strategist Day. Everyone around the table was excited, including me.

But one question kept coming back to me.

IRIBA is a Rwandan social enterprise that brings safe drinking water to communities through self-service water ATMs. Our idea was for it to expand beyond Rwanda by partnering with MTN, Africa’s largest mobile operator with more than 300 million subscribers.

My question was this: Why would a giant like MTN need IRIBA, and what happens to IRIBA the day MTN decides it doesn’t?

I knew that question well. For three-and-a-half years, I had been on the other side of it: the large company negotiating with small partners that needed us far more than we needed them. I also knew that if I was asking that question, the jury would too. Answering it before they could ask would shape our strategy over the hours that followed, and help take us to the final.

WHAT IS THE MASTER STRATEGIST DAY?

The Master Strategist Day is a rite of passage for every INSEAD MBA class. On the Fontainebleau campus, around 300 students, split into four sections and some 60 teams of five, receive the same real-world case and have less than 24 hours to solve it.

At the Tuesday evening kick-off, IRIBA’s CEO described her company and its constraints. More than that, she delivered her question: How can IRIBA grow beyond Rwanda without losing affordability, water quality, and control?

Our strategy professor then set the rules: originality would be rewarded, frameworks were tools rather than answers, and, above all, we would be judged on the quality of our decision-making.

The case was released at 6:30 pm, and every team had to submit its recommendation by 1:00 pm the next day. Each Bain mentor coached four teams: he briefed us at 8:30 am, answered our questions through the morning, then graded each team’s presentation. Only one team per section, roughly one in fifteen, would be selected for the final at 4 pm, in front of the entire cohort and a jury of IRIBA’s CEO, INSEAD professors, and Bain consultants.

AN INNOVATION BUYER IN A ROOM FULL OF STRATEGISTS

I am an engineer by training, and before INSEAD I spent six years in purchasing across the automotive, telecom, defense and energy industries, most recently as a global innovation buyer at Autoliv. My job was to judge partners before anyone signed: scouting startups and suppliers across more than 20 countries, negotiating co-development agreements, and visiting suppliers’ sites to check whether a promising company could actually deliver.

Many of my classmates had spent years building strategy decks; I had spent mine judging partners. I wondered what that could bring to a strategy competition. I found out that night.

HOW 5 PEOPLE BUILD A STRATEGY OVERNIGHT

With so little time, structure was everything. We each read the case alone, then went around the table, each of us in turn sharing our reading of the case and our first ideas, a quick way to check that we had all understood it the same way.

Four options came out of it: building IRIBA’s own subsidiary in a new country; partnering with a telecom operator; selling IRIBA’s technology as a white-label product to local water businesses; and developing a model built around refugee settlements. My role that night was to assess the different models and investigate the research behind them. I focused in particular on the refugee model, but ultimately ruled it out after asking three basic questions any buyer should ask about a new business: who pays, how many customers come in each day, and who is already operating in the market.

I also built our country matrix, scoring potential markets on criteria such as access to drinking water and electricity, mobile-money readiness, local maintenance capacity, and government partnerships. It pointed us to Uganda as the first market after Rwanda.

We voted for a tiebreaker for when debates ran in circles and split the work into workstreams: market analysis, financials, governance, risks, and the deck. We had promised ourselves to stop at midnight. Around us, other teams packed up and left one after another, and each departure made us wonder whether they had already cracked it. We left the breakout room at 1 am and were back in the amphitheater at 8:30.

AN IDEA THAT CHANGED HOW PEOPLE PAY FOR WATER

The idea to partner with MTN came from a teammate who lives and works in Nigeria. We had asked ourselves a simple question: which company is present everywhere, including in the low-income areas IRIBA serves? His answer was immediate: MTN. Those of us who had travelled across Africa recognized it right away.

IRIBA would install its water ATMs at MTN kiosks and keep running the water itself: the machines, the operators, and the quality tests. MTN would bring what IRIBA couldn’t build alone: payments and reach. Customers would top up a water wallet with mobile money and pay by the litre. They could even send litres to someone else – a family member in another village, a school, or an NGO – the way people already send phone credit. IRIBA would gain new countries and new payers without having to fund the expansion alone. MTN would gain daily transactions, new mobile-money users, and a public-health story.

THE QUESTION A BUYER ALWAYS ASKS

I liked the idea. But my career had trained me to stress-test exactly this kind of partnership.

Having sat on the large company’s side of the table, I knew they could walk away when their priorities change, and IRIBA would be a very small partner negotiating with a very large one.

I raised it with the team. We decided to move forward with MTN, and I was fully on board. But a question left unanswered at 1 am is one the jury asks at 4 pm.

FROM DOUBT TO EVIDENCE

The next morning, I took on the slide that would answer my question: Why would MTN actually say yes?

I treated MTN the way I used to treat any new partner: I conducted supplier due diligence. Before trusting a company, a buyer looks at what it has delivered, for whom, and whether they had worked with partners like us. That begged the question: Had MTN ever worked with partners like IRIBA?

It had, and each precedent matched a piece of IRIBA’s model. In Lagos, MTN Nigeria had set up kiosks in bus shelters, run by local young people who sell its products, much like the franchisees who operate IRIBA’s water ATMs.

In Benin, MTN had partnered with a small social enterprise that turns its office paper waste into ecological charcoal. In Uganda, its Changemakers programme funds community projects, including water wells.

None of this proved MTN would say yes. It proved that saying yes would fit what MTN already does. That became one of our strongest slides, titled simply “MTN has said yes before.” My doubt had become evidence.

FROM DOUBT TO DESIGN

The doubt also shaped the recommendation itself: if IRIBA was the smaller partner, the structure had to protect it. In our joint venture, IRIBA kept ownership of its machines and rented them to the venture, so they would return to IRIBA if the partnership ended. It licensed its technology rather than transferring it, held a veto on water safety, and capped bundle prices at the normal price of water. The deal was non-exclusive, so IRIBA remained free to work with other operators, and a neutral chair would break ties on the board.

To me, those safeguards were familiar. In the automotive industry, a buyer insists on owning the tooling a supplier uses, so that production can move elsewhere if the relationship fails. The logic is the same: never let your partner hold the asset you can’t live without. And from my co-development negotiations, I knew that a large company always tries to secure the technology. That told me exactly what IRIBA had to keep.

The non-exclusive clause echoed a lesson I learned in Sweden. At Autoliv, we needed a new manufacturer for electronic components, one that could also handle potting, a demanding process that protects electronics in resin. A small Swedish company, recommended by our own engineers, looked perfect on paper. On site, everything was done by hand, and everything depended on the owner; if he left or fell ill, production would stop. We walked away. In purchasing, the rule is dual sourcing: never depend on a single point of failure, and always keep a second option open. IRIBA could not afford to depend on a single partner either.

THE FINAL

At 1 pm, we presented to our Bain mentor alongside his three other teams. The hardest questions came on finance, from classmates who had spent years in that world. Notably, they asked why our revenue projections were so high. We explained that MTN’s kiosk network would let IRIBA scale its number of water ATMs far faster than it could alone. As a result, our figures were ambitious, but grounded in IRIBA’s own revenue per machine. An audience challenges you where it is strongest.

Then the whole cohort gathered in the David Suddens MBA’78 Amphitheatre: some 300 students, plus faculty and the jury. No team knew whether they had been selected. The four finalists were announced in front of everyone; when our team was called, we had to present again with no time to prepare. We were the last of the four to go on stage.

That meant watching the others first. One finalist team had proposed partnering IRIBA with a large multinational, and the jury asked them the very question I had been carrying since the night before: what makes you think they would agree to work with IRIBA? Sitting in the audience, I knew that our answer was already on our slides.

I presented our risks and how we would mitigate them, the safeguards we had built to protect IRIBA, and then our roadmap: growing step-by-step from Rwanda towards safe drinking water for all of Africa. When our turn came, nobody on the jury asked us why MTN would say yes, perhaps because the answer was already there. We finished third out of some 60 teams. Walking off that stage, I was happy and genuinely proud of our team; a few weeks earlier, we had been strangers, and that afternoon we had presented our strategy to the founder of the company whose future we had spent the night debating.

Congratulations to the winning team, whose polished presentation earned them the title.

WHAT I TOOK AWAY

The first lesson is the one I will carry into every strategy room: a doubt is worthless until you turn it into evidence. Raising a concern is easy. Testing it, and then building the answer into the solution, is what makes it valuable. In consulting terms, a doubt is a hypothesis to test, not an opinion to defend.

The second is that frameworks don’t decide for you. Sixty teams had the same case, the same tools, the same deadline and reached very different strategies. The difference was judgment.

THE INSEAD WAY

Looking back, our recommendation could only have come from a team like ours: five people, five nationalities, and careers spanning North America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Europe. A Lebanese engineer who had become a deputy managing director in Nigeria knew how business works on the ground in West Africa. An American consultant from New York had advised telecom companies, the very industry of our partner. A Spanish M&A professional from Dubai knew how deals like ours are structured. An Indian teammate, who had built partnerships in the social sector, kept us focused on the communities IRIBA serves. And I brought an innovation buyer’s eye for partners and power.

What struck me most was watching them work. Our former consultant could turn a messy discussion into a clear, convincing slide in minutes. Our banker built a financial analysis in the time it would have taken me to set up the spreadsheet. I had come to INSEAD to learn exactly those skills, and that night taught me more than weeks of class. But I also realized the reverse was true: my creativity and instinct for judging the right partners were skills they were glad to have in the room.

That is what INSEAD puts into practice: an international mix of backgrounds and careers that, well-executed, takes a team further than any single perspective could.

TO APPLICANTS WHO DON’T COME FROM CONSULTING

If you are applying with a background in engineering, operations, purchasing or anything outside consulting and finance, you might wonder, as I did, what you will bring to a room full of strategists. My answer after the Master Strategist Day: more than you think. The frameworks can be learned in a few weeks. The instincts you built in your career cannot, and they may be exactly what your team is missing.

A big thank you to my teammates Khalil Francis, Alfonso Aguilar Vázquez, Sakshi Arora and Senna Headley, with whom I would happily spend another sleepless night.

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Jeff Cheung is an INSEAD MBA candidate (27J) and President of the INSEAD Search Fund & ETA Club, whose 2026 conference in Fontainebleau drew more than 600 investors, searchers and operators. An engineer by training with a specialized master’s in international purchasing and innovation, he spent six years in procurement across the automotive, telecom, defense and energy industries, most recently at Autoliv. He is drawn to the space where operations meet strategy.

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