Team Henley (Mahin Redlin, Yen Chi Le, Dennis K, Rohith Biju, Jilna Solanki and Smuruthi Kesavan), 3rd Place (Cash Prize of CHF 500 (equivalent to around £370))

Our group, Team Henley, completed the BeeUp Consulting Project as part of the postgraduate MSc module MMM121 “Understanding Emerging Markets”. We selected our individual group members to form a team of six people and liaised closely with both our lecturer, Dr Stephan Gerschewski, and BeeUp CEO and Founder Mr Michael Czarniecki for the duration of the project, which took place from February to April 2018. More than 340 students were competing in the project from all around the world, including Switzerland, Germany, and UK.

The module convener of MMM121 ‘Understanding Emerging Markets’, Dr Stephan Gerschewski, emphasised that the rationale for incorporating BeeUp in the module related mainly to provide Henley Business School students with a highly engaging and experiential learning assignment, which could be also useful for the students’ career after graduation and beyond.

The main purpose of the BeeUp Business Plan Competition was to be imaginative, yet realistic, to develop a future business solution/idea for a small and medium-sized real-life client. To create a viable solution, we put ourselves in the roles of consultants, customers and other stakeholders, in order to see the potential benefits that our business proposal may bring to each of the respective parties.

Ultimately, we developed the idea of an ‘ecosystem currency’, which may reduce the transaction costs for businesses within a particular network or ‘ecosystem’, e.g. an industry. Mr. Czarniecki of BeeUp kindly guided us throughout the whole project primarily via Skype conferences, and provided us with some hints and directions when we found ourselves stuck. He motivated us to think about the solution from different angles and different viewpoints, which fuelled our team’s motivation to ultimately succeed!

It was an incredibly rewarding experience, connecting both theoretical frameworks such as business canvas models with real-life scenarios, which are skills that we could ultimately build on in other MSc modules. We’d happily do it all over again!

Team Henley.

For further information and any feedback/questions about BeeUp, please contact Dr Stephan Gerschewski, email: s.gerschewski@henley.ac.uk, phone: 0118 – 378 7176

For further information about BeeUp, please refer to the organisation’s website http://www.beeup.com