Real Projects, Real Stakes,
Real Impact
In a course with a real client component, students dive into hands-on experience, applying classroom knowledge to real-world scenarios. It’s the ultimate bridge between theory and practice to prepare for success beyond the classroom.
Become a Questrom ‘Client’
Do you have a business challenge or back-burner project that could benefit from some great thought power? Become a Questrom ”client.” Our students will gain real-world experience, and you’ll gain well-researched and informed insights that could lead to actionable results.
Recent Projects
- Provide strategies for improving defensibility and reducing leakage for a procurement management platform
- Create and enhance network effects for a platform that provides revenue producing content to streamers
- Evaluate the impact of EV’s on the roadside assistance business
- A go-to-market strategy for the US launch of an international mental health and wellness AI tool created by a world-renowned psychologist
- Assess strategic options for a specialty medicine company to deliver value-based care
- Competitor analysis for a biopharma and medical device custom learning solutions company
- Brand repositioning and digital marketing campaign for an award-winning U.K. Detective /Mystery game entering the US market
- New product ideation and digital marketing campaign for an iconic American national candy brand
- Develop go-to-market strategy for a point of care testing and management platform
- Brand positioning and growth strategy for a sustainable apparel brand expanding in new markets
- Market analysis and brand strategy for a reusable container technology focused on circle economy.
- Provide valuation for an early stage biotech company
- Evaluate the impact of machine learning and AI on the audit business for a public accounting firm
Client Success Stories
Students aren’t the only ones who benefit. Many of our partners implement new strategies and recommendations resulting from the projects — with proven results.
The executive team gave this task: create a fresh customer acquisition strategy – aiming for a 20% boost in new customers and slashing the cost by 10% over the next year. The student team dove deep into the data, dissected their current marketing strategy, and discovered that their customer acquisition process needed some work. They developed data-driven theories and ran experiments to find the weak spots.
The recommendation? Cast a wider net with a mix of marketing tactics to find new customers. Skip ahead a year, the Questrom team:
- Increased the company’s revenue by $1 million in the first year.
- Improved the company’s brand awareness.
- Made the company more competitive in the market.
Featured Experiential Learning projects
BU Students Win $50,000 for Helping L.L.Bean Become More Eco-Friendly
Inexpensive clothes from retailers like Amazon and Shein make it easy to follow trends, but fast fashion has downsides. On average, such clothing is worn only 10 times before being discarded, contributing to 11.3 million garments in U.S. landfills each year. Questrom School of Business contest offered $50,000 to student entrepreneurs to find solutions to this problem.
A few of our company partners
- Athletic Brewing
- Avery Dennison
- Azenta Life Sciences
- Booking.com
- Boston Medical Center
- Commonwealth Hotel
- Flywire
- Hewlett Packard
- Ibsen Pharmaceuticals
- Point32Health
- Prudential Financial
- Marriott
- Merrill Lynch
- Outerknown
- Paratek BioPharma
- Polestar
- Recirclable
- US Bank
- WellSense Health Plan
- Zurich Financial
Experiential Learning Courses
At Questrom, you’ll have everything you need to go from idea to impact. Build your entrepreneurial toolkit in Design Thinking and Innovation. Expand your business outlook beyond the US with Global Entrepreneurship and the International Consulting Project. You’ll use actual data sets and scenarios to solve real problems, giving you the experiences you’ll need to hit the ground running when you graduate.
Here is a sampling of our Experiential Learning Courses.
“The challenges highlighted specifically in the action learning project included limited resource allocation, organizational structure and potential forms of the way a social impact business can be organized, the necessity to stay adaptable to change, and more. Most importantly, it highlighted an utterly important issue – how to achieve and measure the social impact KPI’s, and at the same time stay profitable. This insight has equipped me with a nuanced perspective on the intricacies involved in implementing strategies within the unique context of the social sector. “
~Marek Michalak
Full-time Social Impact MBA
Strategy Implementation SI859
During the course students will work on a consulting team that addresses a real-world challenge posed by a client in the health sector industry. While gaining practical client experience, students will learn about the consulting process through a series of lectures which describe its each step, from writing a letter of engagement to delivering findings. By the end of the course, students will know how to sell projects and serve as health sector consultants.
This challenging course provides a hands-on consulting project for a real world client interested in launching, transitioning to, or growing a platform business. It provides not only foundational theories of network effects, governance, openness, and strategy but also practical skills in investing, monetizing, and designing platform marketplaces. Past clients have included Airbnb, Fidelity, Mahindra, Siemens, and Tencent. Taught by two of the faculty who have written the leading articles for Harvard Business Review, this course will help you launch, build, and manage all aspects of multi-sided platforms.
In this course students work directly with successful entrepreneurs and brand leaders through a critical growth stage offering fresh insights and evidence-based decisions on a new market strategy. Students and clients workshop ideas together on how to reposition the brand and create a stronger competitive advantage. The final student presentations showcase the innovative ideas and sample creative campaigns that help brands see themselves differently, shape better customer-centric products and services, and are often implemented immediately.
This advanced MBA elective equips students with practical frameworks, practices, and tools for translating strategic decisions into strategic action and managing execution as middle managers in established organizations. Through action learning based real-world client projects, students gain hands-on experience in strategic decision-making, the acquisition, development, and organization of new resources, capabilities, and competencies, and the successful management of the organizational dynamics of strategic innovation and change.
In this course, MBA students engage in hands-on ideation to conceptualize new revenue-generating products or services for a large client company. Through testing and validation processes, students learn to navigate the complexities of innovation management, honing skills vital for driving sustainable growth and competitive advantage in today’s dynamic business landscape.
International Field Projects
International field projects offer deep dive into the world of global business, providing students with hands-on experiences that explore the nuances of international markets. From tackling real-world challenges to immersing themselves in diverse cultures, students gain invaluable insights into the dynamic interplay of business, culture, and commerce on a global scale.
Luxury Business Global Immersion Course
In Milan, learning about luxury means living it. Students in the Luxury Business Global Immersion course led by Professor Hambrick embark on a deep-dive experiential learning experience focused on one of France’s leading economic sectors: luxury goods and services. Students examine best business practices and challenges behind the global economic success of the French luxury goods industries. While in Paris, students will get a closer look into leading businesses serving high-end consumers across industries such as cosmetics, wine and spirits, high-end fashion, retail, hotels, real-estate, airplanes, and auctions as well as a historical perspective on how France became the leader in the luxury goods market. We will also learn about how global consumer trends such as sustainability, the resell market and economic downturn affects the luxury segment. Management issues in the luxury goods and services industries will be covered during firm visits, discussions with high-level executives and via an experiential consulting project. Students will meet with top executives and decision makers across business functions such as customer-relationship management, marketing, branding, operations, manufacturing, and financial planning.
Social Impact Field Seminar
How do organizations develop innovative products and services that act as sustainable solutions to social challenges? Students tackle these issues by doing a consulting project for a client from a host country and then present their recommendation to the client in person. Recent trip locations include Brazil, Peru, Mexico and South Africa.
International Consulting Project
Have you ever dreamed of climbing the Great Wall of China? How about consulting to a Chinese firm in Beijing? This MBA course involves consulting work with a trip to Asia to deliver the team’s recommendation personally to the client at their offices. Much of the past students’ work over the years has both been implemented and widely published in the Chinese business press. It’s an exciting, rigorous, team-based project that students have parlayed into jobs, both domestically and internationally, in strategy consulting.
Global Management Experience
Following the theme of Global Strategic Effectiveness, students do a deep dive on the cultural underpinnings that affect doing business in so many of these different locations. During the Field Study, you’ll meet with different companies in Asia with plenty of time for sightseeing.
Experiential Learning for Undergrads
Experiential Learning at Questrom is woven into both the Undergraduate and Graduate student experience.
Undergraduate Cross-Functional Core
During sophomore year, all undergraduate students participate in a semester-long team-based core project that integrates coursework across finance, operations management, marketing, and data analytics, enabling teams to develop a comprehensive new product or service business plan.
Real Estate Development Course
In the Real Estate Development Course students take part in the Urban Planning Competition, in partnership with the Urban Land Institute, aiming to redesign 11+ acres in an inner city to balance the needs of the community, city, and developer with marketing, environmental, and equity strategies. Student groups presented to industry professionals from the Urban Land Institute.
Venture Capital Investment Competition
The Venture Capital Investment Competition is a completely anonymous business case competition where 6 student teams from different universities in the region simulate being Venture Capital firms and must decide to invest in one company after hearing 4 real entrepreneurs pitch their start-ups. Undergraduates get incredible experience thinking on their toes as they receive unpredictable responses during short 14-minute Q&A sessions.
Case Competitions are kind of our thing…
During the 2022-2023 academic year, 20 Questrom MBA teams competed in case competitions. Here are a few highlights.
Battle of the Boutiques
Each year, participants form, storm, norm, and perform over just 7 days. This year’s challenge tasked teams with determining strategic direction and increasing global recognition of local restaurant Shaking Crab as it faces high operating and labor costs. This is a slightly different type of case competition because the judges and mentors are not just executives but consultants and hiring managers with the boutique firms sponsoring the competition.
Susilo Institute Business + Ethics Case Competition
20+ teams from 6 world regions tackling tough business and ethics questions provide a forum for students and executives worldwide to discuss, debate, and analyze the merits of international business and its intersection with ethics. The winning team from each region received $10,000 to travel to the final in Southeast Asia.
New Venture Competition
The New Venture Competition awards $72,000 in prizes to early-stage BU entrepreneurs and helps them transform their ideas into something real.
