Master students of the Institute of Economics and Management (IEM) of Tomsk State University presented their projects to Vita Liberta company at an international webinar as part of the Design Thinking course.
Vita Liberta is a business partner of IEM and has been part in the International Management program for the fourth year already. The company provides consulting support for international businesses in Russia and helps Russian entrepreneurs to develop new business directions abroad. Vita Liberta works in Russia, Hong Kong, China, UAE, Kazakhstan and other countries.
– Cooperationwith business partners is one of the key priorities of our master’s program, and the project work gives students invaluable practical experience, and may well become a foundation for professional internship and career in an international company, – said Prof. Olga Nedospasova, head of the International Management program at IEM TSU.
Earlier, at the online meetings with IEM master students the head of the company Sergey Konon told about the specifics of international entrepreneurship support. The expert also offered students several topical areas for projects in Design Thinking: customer acquisition and loyalty, expansion into new markets, international strategy.
During the semester, students prepared their solutions for the company. Throughout the entire project they were guided by Vladislav Rutskoy, an associate professor at the Siberian Federal University, who taught Design Thinking in English. The students worked on their tasks proposed by the director of Vita Liberta in two groups and individually.
Master students from Nigeria Bwalya Chewe Precious and Azrakhaila Syafina Juni worked on a joint project “Automated Customer Engagement System”. Another group – Alena Nagaitseva, Victoria Sviridenko and Sofia Zlobina – created a service for consulting and feedback after sales. Another student from Nigeria, Nooh Abdelmoneim Elhadi Ahmed, presented a project “Strategic Management Master Class on Brand Identity”.
The students presented the prototypes of their strategic ideas for business process management in any company (using Vita Liberta as an example) at the international project webinar.
Sergey Konon marked the students’ work quite high and confirmed that the company is ready to provide them with practical training based on the results of the webinar. The previous experience of such projects has shown that the ideas of master students are quite feasible and can be useful for employers.
