We had the final presentation of our thesis today at the Heraeus site in Hanau, and all went really, really well. Heraeus is an interesting German, family owned high-tech company and it is not everyday that you have the opportunity to present and discuss your findings to the two most senior managers of a company with 12 thousand employees in over 70 countries and a turnover of more than 11 billion Euro. Yeah, billion.

Our academic supervisor, our project sponsor (head of corporate development) and a great team!

The presentation went smoothly and was actually fun. I was very happy with the results of the team and so were the professor and the company, I had the impression. It was an intensive 2 months of work, getting ourselves into a very new subject for us, but the conclusion we got were solid and useful for the company. And we learned a lot, especially from the 10 or so interviews we conducted with senior managers from important corporations.
But not all is over, we still have 50% of our thesis to be written this week and, after that, we all will be MBAs, deservedly.

But tonitght we have decided to commemorate a bit. And I should go back to where the music is playing.

This is the great team I have been working since June. During this project, we have interviewed all 5 Business Units of Heraeus to establish the technology fields we would look at, I developed an online algorithm for skimming the internet, we identified over a hundred information providers, had interviews with high profile professionals in 3 international high-tech corporations and got in touch with at least 2 VC firms.
There is still a lot of work to be done (like preparing the final presentation and actually writing the thesis), but I am very happy with the results so far, considering all the other paralel activities that have taken place (like job search and rowing competition) during this period.

 

Thats us working on the master thesis at the new Mannheim Business School facilities at the Dalberg Platz, N2.