Real-World Experience That Benefits World Businesses Wharton Global Consulting Practicum partnership in Peru wins ANDA award
Josefa Nolte was faced with a business impasse. Her Peruvian nonprofit, Mercomujer, had carved out a successful niche making toys and other hand-made objects through rural women’s cooperatives. But the nonprofit’s distribution, accounting, and other organizational systems were haphazard at best, and Nolte didn’t have the tens of thousands of dollars it would take to hire a first-world consulting firm to help her shore up her back office.
Enter the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum (GCP). Four Wharton MBA students and four from a partner program at the Universidad Del Pacifico in Lima, Peru spent several months consulting for Mercomujer, coming up with what Nolte believes is first-class advice. “I think they have done great work,” said Nolte. “They had to understand the logic of an enterprise working under the cover of an NGO (non-governmental organization) and all of the difficulties of working with 800 producers in 40 different sites in Peru.”
Nolte’s nonprofit was one of four Peruvian organizations assisted this year by the WGCP/Universidad Del Pacifico partnership, which was recently recognized by the National Association of Advertisers. The NAA awarded its prestigious ANDA award for Innovation in Education to the MBA program at the Universidad Del Pacifico’s graduate school, an honor given to an educational organization that carries out a creative and innovative initiative in teaching.
The group of students consulting with Mercomujer, the GCP’s first Social Impact Management Project, have all signed on to continue consulting for the nonprofit rather than wrapping up their work when their course ended. “What was interesting is that there is a nexus between environmental concerns, women’s concerns, business, and a host of other things,” said Emily Lin, a Wharton student on the team. “When you work with a nonprofit, you really get into it. It grows itself organically.”
The Value of Experience
In all, more than 500 Wharton MBA students have helped more than 100 global companies develop market entry strategies for North America through the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum. Started as an experiment 25 years ago by Wharton Professor Leonard Lodish, the GCP was initially conceived as a way for students to gain real-world experience in international consulting. Lodish, who still runs the program, recruited foreign business schools to both help find companies which could benefit from the student consultants and lend their students to be part of an international team effort.
"This is a chance to be cross-cultural, to have a complete functional experience," said Lodish. "We've become more sophisticated over time, but the idea is still the same, a capstone course, something of real value to both the students and the company for which they consult."
Over the 25 years, the students have consulted for just about every imaginable type of industry in countries including India, Chile, and Israel. For the 2003-2004 group, the 10 clients ranged from a winery to a feminine hygiene products manufacturer to a billing outsourcing firm to the nonprofit Mercomujer.
What criteria are used when choosing firms to assist? "The first is that there is a reasonable, prima fascie reason for them to be successful in the United States market," said Lodish. "They have to have something leverageable. Management has to have the courage to do something different. And they have to have the resources to be able to implement what we suggest."
Lodish points to Kitan, an Israeli company, as a GCP success story. Kitan had about 240 products in its varied line of merchandise, but was exporting none of them, when it came to the practicum for advice 20 years ago. "The students went through a winnowing process and came up with a detailed marketing plan for the company's 100-percent cotton flannel sheets," he said. "There were OSHA standards that prohibited U.S. companies from making them and the main competition was in Portugal and China. The designs in Portugal were not as good as Kitan's, and the ones from the Far East didn't have their quality. The student team did a step-by-step plan and the export manager followed it almost word for word," said Lodish. After about six years, he said, the export business was doing $10-15 million in sales. "They wouldn't have been around, it is fair to say, if our project wouldn't have happened."
