Students will be assigned to a Business Project with ABB or with McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey & Company

Background to the topic of enquiry

“Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages” is listed as one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There are more opportunities than ever to achieve universal health, thanks to advancement of technology. However, the question remains whether we are adopting technology fast enough to make significant progress in actualizing the goal. This project aims to look into technology adoption in the healthcare sphere in each local market and propose recommendations to speed up universal health solutions.

Overall project aim

#SpeedUpHealthTech: How ready is our society in leveraging technology to improve adoption for health solutions?

Project Details and expected Objectives

1. Assessment of status quo - Current adoption of tech-enabled healthcare solutions and bottlenecks :

In a first step, students are expected to look into the host university’s national healthcare system and identify the current progress of technological adoption along the entire decision journey (availability, awareness, consideration, usage and loyalty). Students would need to identify bottlenecks and factors for leakage along this journey.

2. Development and implementation of recommendations

In a second step, students should propose solutions based on their findings. Students are also expected to prioritize solutions based on a matrix    

of effectiveness and feasibility and develop a high-level implementation plan.
McKinsey consultants will provide guidance to students with background literature on the topic, as well as narrow the topic focus based on specific use cases in healthcare. Students are not expected to have any background knowledge in healthcare or related fields. More details on specific tasks and research questions will be provided to the selected student team in the beginning of the project.

ABB

Performance Management – Tell a cohesive story in our reporting

As most companies, ABB uses different platforms that together contain valuable information regarding current customers, market insights and various performance indicators. In fact, ABB currently uses :

- A global CRM platform (salesforce.com)

- A common platform for market insights

- A core platform for financial reporting

The challenge is that these platforms are not yet connected and hence it is difficult to answer important questions such as "Is ABB growing faster than the market and is ABB competing their competitors?"; "Is ABB's sales pipeline big enough and in which areas should ABB concentrate?"

The outcome of the business project should be to connect and adjust existing dashboards in a comprehensive way. In the process, several questions must be addressed, for instance: How many dashboards does ABB need? To what extent should the dashboards be managed (pre-build) and tailored to personas? To what extent can ABB live with self-reporting "only"?

ABB has extensive experience with CEMS Business Projects. Students will be supported by ABB and some of its strategic partners (e.g.salesforce.com; Jedox; SAP; IBM) so as a to grasp which dashboards and platforms currently exist and how they function. There are no pre-requisites for this business project.

Knowledge and Understanding:

After completing this course, students will have:

• extended their knowledge on strategy processes  
• learned how to collect, analyze, and structure data
• developed project management skills
• received feedback from practitioners on the outcome of their analyses and the viability of their recommendations

Cognitive & Subject Specific Skills:

Upon completion of the course, students will have the ability to:

• develop critical thinking and defend their developed arguments in class and in front of practitioners
• apply tools for analyzing challenges in the global environment

Key Skills:

Students upon completion of the course will have the ability to:

• conduct research on global strategy processes
• gather and filter information efficiently and effectively on a specific research topic
• organize teamwork including presentation and report writing skills
• shift material quickly and efficiently to structure it into a coherent argument and to present it in a concise way tailored to a professional audience
• present this business project to the partner in a professional way, through personal presentation skills and support of suitable media,
• utilize the theoretical knowledge and the interpersonal skills developed throughout their studies to solve a real-life challenge.

As this course format heavily relies on personal interaction between students, ABB, McKinsey and faculty, presence in sessions is mandatory. More than two times absence during the sessions announced at the beginning of the seminar will lead to exclusion from the seminar.

This business project uses a combination of discussions with ABB and McKinsey representatives and external solution providers, feedback sessions, presentations, group coaching, as well as individual/group work outside the classroom. Groups of students will be formed in the kick-off session.

In a first kick-off session with the supervising faculty, the challenges and milestones of the case will be outlined. At the same time, students will be familiarized with the guiding principles of project work, with the project plan and rules in handling the supervising faculty and ABB/McKinsey interaction.

Afterwards, the students will officially kick-off the project in collaboration with ABB and McKinsey. In a plenary session, ABB and McKinsey will outline the challenges from their perspective and provide useful input for the project (e.g. experience on former, related projects) and the specific challenges to be dealt with. As a result of that, students will come up with the precise scope of the project.

Subsequently, the students will receive training on the needed software solutions and will start the collaboration with ABB/McKinsey.

Throughout the process, various feedback loops (in coaching and feedback sessions with the faculty and/or ABB/McKinsey) will be installed to make sure that students are on the right track and get relevant input needed in each project phase.

Results will be presented to ABB/McKinsey managers at the end of this process. The verbal and printed presentations will be assessed. Students will have to actively participate in class, hold group presentations and summarize their findings in a final report (final presentation document). It is the policy of the class that no late assignments will be accepted under any circumstances.

Assessment is based on the quality of the mid- and end-term presentation, the participation during the classes, group members’ peer ratings, and the final report (final presentation document).

Group assessment:

• Mid-term Presentation (PowerPoint Document): 20%
• Mid-term Presentation (oral Presentation): 10%
• End-term Presentation (PowerPoint Document): 30%
• End-term Presentation to Corporate Partner: 20%

Individual:

• Peer rating: 20%

Students will be assessed on:

• their ability to understand and analyze international strategy and/or management challenges,
• their ability to use the appropriate analytical techniques and to come up with relevant advice,
• the quality of the presentations and the written reports; by quality in this context we mean the clarity and persuasiveness of each bit of work. This implies an ability to work in teams.

Students failing to participate in their teams will lose the marks for that piece of work.

WU will retain a copy of all coursework for Teaching Quality Assessment as part of the ongoing quality assessment program. It is important, therefore, that students make a second copy for their own purposes.

There are no pre-requisites for the project with ABB.

Some students selected in the project with McKinsey will need a rough understanding of the Austrian public healthcare sector and be able to conduct a number of interviews in German. 

We will try to accomodate preferences as much as possible while accounting for fit with the specific project and team composition balance. Please send a CV and describe your preference for one of the two projects (if any) directly in the body of the email (a few sentences will be sufficient) to benoit.decreton@wu.ac.at as you sign up. Group assignments will be communicated shortly after the sign-up period.