China Lab, an initiative of six premier business schools: Fudan University School of Management, Lingnan (University) College at Sun Yat-sen University, Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, Yunnan University School of Business and Tourism Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance and the MIT Sloan School of Management.
China Lab is an exceptional new program, combining traditional classroom learning with intensive real-world experience. MBA teams work on what is essentially a 3-month consulting project. Companies set the project focus and negotiate with their teams to agree on the scope, schedule and deliverables. That is, the teams work on the problems host companies want to fix. China Lab is not only a class, but also a rare opportunity for world-class, practical analysis and recommendations by some of the brightest young professionals from throughout the world.
Fudan- MIT China Lab is also one part of Fudan MBA iLab. This year, we have four teams composed of 16 business students: 8 MIT Sloan MBAs and 8 IMBAs from Fudan. The students have a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, ranging from management consulting and financial services to manufacturing and service operations. For them China Lab represents not only a course but also a singular opportunity to hone their business and consulting expertise.
In the JOIN WEEK from Jan 14th to Jan 18th, Fudan-MIT China Lab projects have kick off meetings with partner companies. Each team together with the Fudan faculty mentor have an onsite visit in the company and make face-to-face communications with the company representatives to discuss the scope of the project, the timeline and the work plan. This year, the four famous companies are Shanghai Origin, Suzhou Bosch, Changzhou Keteng, Beijing CTG, covering marketing, business model innovation, education training, supply chain etc.
Fudan-MIT China Lab Project: Shanghai Origin team
On the morning of Jan.17th, 2013, Fudan China Lab Origin team together with faculty mentor Prof. Tzeng had a kick off with the President Mr. Huang and James Xu and Bill Yu from IT department of Origin International Logistics Co.,Ltd to discuss the upcoming project.
At the beginning, Fudan Origin team members made a brief introduction of their previous work experience to help the company knowing more about their ability. After that Mr. Huang introduced the company and explained the purpose of launching the project in detail. Mr. Huang said that though Origin Group developed rapidly recent years, but they are not only focus on the speed of development, but also the future opportunities. In order to face the increasingly fierce competition, Origin is seeking for a new business model based on existing advantages to complete a successful transformation and achieve sustainable competitive advantages.
Based on the introduction, Bill Yu shared more details about the business have already done in current business models, as well as the main clients, current approaches of cooperation and the target market. James Xu suggested the Origin team looking into the future, approaching from the overall perspective and focusing on the innovation when doing the project.
At the end of the meeting, Mr. Huang expressed his expectation to Fudan Origin team and emphasized that this project is a meaningful and creative project needing Fudan Origin team to use intelligent, capability and knowledge of latest business model in E-Commerce.
After the kick off meeting, Fudan students were all very interested and excited about the coming challenges and ensured that the cooperation between Fudan, MIT and Origin would be successful.
Fudan-MIT China Lab Project: Beijing Chia Tai Group Agro-Industry &Food Business Team
On Jan. 15th, 2013, the first video conference between Chia Tai Group and Fudan Group took place in Room 808 of Li Dasan Building. Attendees are Mr. Xue (President), Mr. Wang (Manager), Amy (Assistant) from CTG group and Sherry Hong(China Lab-Fudan Coordinator), Professor Tzeng (Fudan faculty mentor), Cecilia Lv (team member), Cathy Su (team member) from Fudan team.
It was an initiative and fruitful meeting, making imperative preparations for further follow-ups. The main agenda includes four sections: mutual-introduction of Fudan team, faculty mentor and company representatives, introduction to the project, discussion of the project scope/ timeline / work plan, and Q&A.
Thanks to Mr. Xue, Mr. Wang and Amy’s kind and patient guidance, as well as Mr. Zeng and Ms. Sherry’s help, we’ve had a better understanding of the company and the project, and looked further into the working schedule.
We’ve learned that CP Group has always put a great emphasis on employee development. The CP Group in Thailand has a lot more experiences regarding corporate training and private school management (E.g. CP Leadership Institute). While the CP Group in China established an online school in 2007, which has contributed tremendously to its corporate development, especially for retail business. Considering the extensive expansion of its agricultural and food business, CP group now intends to integrate internal and external resources to establish a more efficient and systematic training school. And it has embarked on a comprehensive plan to build a CP training center in Cixi, Zhejiang Province, where there’s a national modern agricultural development zone.
The objects of the project are how to set up an organizational structure and how to run the school effectively, with practical benefits for business development and in accordance with corporate strategic considerations.
For the other two MIT members, who has shown great interest in this project but are unavailable for meeting during the winter vocation, they’ll be informed every details of the conference by mail simultaneously.
With confidence and passion inside, we’re all looking forward to an enjoyable and productive collaboration in the near future.
Fudan-MIT China Lab Project: Changzhou Keteng team
On Friday the 18th January 2013, Ms. Sherry Hong, Ms. Isaree Leelasuwan and Ms. Zhang Wei visited Changzhou Keteng Textile Co., Ltd in Changzhou. Mr. Jianhua Lu, the founder of Keteng trading company, together with Ms. Jane He, head of international trade department and Mr. Ryan Qiu, head of administration department, extended a very warm welcome to all visitors.
After self-introduction, Mr. Lu gave a brief introduction about Keteng Company as a raw cotton trading company established since 2002. The company supplies both domestic and imported raw cotton to yarn manufactures in China as well as oversea. Majority of the company’s raw cotton suppliers are from Xinjiang and the company located its warehouses close to their clients in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shandong. Mr. Lu and his staff then express their appreciation to the last year China-lab’s help in structuring the company organization. They hoped that this year china-lab could help them in forming the innovative mechanism that would improve the innovation capability of employees through institutionalization and create new value-added business model. Regarding the current key performance indicators that were used in the organization, there was none; they were mainly based on supervisor’s intuition. This is what China-lab can do to standardize performance measurement system. Mr. Lu hoped that this could then aligned with the company business strategy and differentiate Keteng Company from other raw cotton traders.
This first meeting had successfully established initial cooperation between China-lab team and Keteng Company. And it was also the first step that China-lab team learnt what is the company goal in this project and narrow the scope of the project to focus in the key issue that need to be analyzed for solutions. The Fudan China-lab team will then confer this information with their MIT counterpart for further discussion.
Fudan-MIT China Lab Project: Suzhou Bosch Team
On the afternoon of January 18th, Fudan-MIT China Lab students Mitch and Jeek as well as Fudan IMBA director Sun Long had a meeting with Stefan Gaebele at Bosch’s Suzhou factory. Mr Gaebele is the technical director and is in charge of design and process improvement.
In the meeting, Mr Gaebele said as the world became more aware of the environment problem and climate change, people have called for sustainable development across all industries. Sustainable development means higher efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint. China has enjoyed relatively cheap energy price over the past 30 years of rapid development; however, it is faced with many social and environmental problems. Many people foresee that energy prices in China as well as in the world, in the long run will keep rising. Being efficient is not only an environmental or social issue, it is also economical.
Mr. Gaebele took us on a brief tour of the factory. He told us the factory was built according to the “state of the art” technology about one year ago. Indeed the design of the facility was very impressive. Given all of the achievement that have been done in Bosch, Mr Gaebele believes there is still a lot of room for improvement, Bosch has been encouraging employees to contributes ideas and soliciting ideas out of the company, and this is why Bosch welcomes the Fudan-MIT China Lab students to work with them.
The meeting took an hour and a half, it was very constructive and certainly laid out a solid foundation for the next movement.
Fudan MBA Program
