ICP Team 13

It's 5:30am and I just got back from a long ICP night before our final presentation tomorrow and then off to London on Friday for our "final" final presentation.....​Here are my classmates from ICP Team 13 with a great and inspiring blog entry!

Team 13 – The Story matters!

We have entered the final week of ICP project, the stage to consolidate and organize all our findings and to tell a compelling story.  As the driving finish to the racers, it’s the critical time for the team to deliver and to prove our value added to the client.

The scope of our project is to develop a go-to market strategy for a new product, under the context of the uniqueness of the Swiss agriculture business industry. The agriculture business may not been viewed as “sexy” as the Brazilian beer industry. However, when we started diving into the research and industry analysis phase during the first two weeks, we were amazed by how advanced the technologies are in the activities the farmers are involved in, how the dynamic is influenced by different players, and especially by the government policy, and how unique the situation in Switzerland is compared to the rest of the world. Besides the excitement, we also realized the challenge. For example, most of the farmers and stakeholders don’t speaking English, which puts more pressure on the two local team members for gathering information.

During our project, one of the magic moments was two hours before the mid-term presentation and workshop, when our program director walked into the study room and gave advice to our storyline. Using the same supporting material we had already gathered, he helped us to come up with a different story, linking all the evidence and making a conclusion with great depth. The transformation teaches us an important lesson. Often in the project, instead of lacking information, we have more, but fragmented information. The key to deliver a good project is not to seek for more information, but to integrate and make sense of each element to tell a coherent story.

Besides the knowledge of the agriculture industry, the more important thing we have learned during the ICP I is people. Business is all about people. Given the time constraint we keep reflecting on how to interact with the client, how to communicate with the program director and how to work efficiently as a team. In the real world, dealing with ambiguity, making decisions under time pressure, and fast learning–and-applying are part of daily practice. We are not perfect but we keep improving. 

Towards the end of the ICP I journey, in the harvest season, we will tell a great story, to the client, and to ourselves!