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Afternoon Insight Sessions
Broaden your horizons
Get inspired by daily presentations and Q&As with leading experts from a variety of industries and fields.
Choose one of four topics daily
Monday:
The Chinese Way to Compete
Winter Nie, IMD Faculty; Howard Yu, IMD Faculty
Home-grown companies in emerging markets are increasingly becoming formidable challengers to traditional multinational companies. This afternoon insight session looks at how Chinese companies compete and how established multinationals can respond. The first part will discuss four interesting features regarding the way in which the Chinese innovate: innovation on-site, innovation to reduce costs, tailored innovation and rapid product innovation. The second will discuss how Chinese companies move up the value chain and how established multinationals can reintegrate activities that unlock new market opportunities in order to escape commodity hell.
Shift Happens - The Challenge of Change
Catherine DeVrye, Former Australian Executive Woman of the Year
The seven most expensive words for an organization are: "We have always done it that way." Yet change in work environments is inevitable. This afternoon insight session will outline the benefits of embracing change for future success. Incorporating material from the best seller, Hot Lemon & Honey - Reflections for Success in Times of Change, we will be reminded to take time to reflect, recharge and recession-proof our resilience - because even leaders can't always control circumstances, but can always control attitudes in times of professional and personal change. It will also highlight issues such as avoiding complacency, appreciating the economic benefits of eco-friendliness, differentiating between adding value or just adding cost, and being a victor from change instead of a victim.
Building a Brand
David Roman, Chief Marketing Officer, Lenovo
Which brands have the power to transcend their cultural origins and create strong relationships with consumers around the world? This afternoon insight session will share Lenovo's experience in developing a global brand, including challenges to be overcome and the learning experience from the team.
Seven Stages of a Global Leader
Maury Peiperl, IMD Faculty
Professionals, and by extension, organizations, can attain different levels of "global." Not every leader, nor every firm, needs to work at the highest levels. But the average "globalness" need, and thus the de-facto level, is moving up.
This afternoon insight session will cover the basics of the seven levels, with examples of effective leadership and successful organizations at each. We will also examine how some managers and firms get "stuck" below the threshold level for their success - which may have increased while they weren't looking - and what they can do about it.
Tuesday:
Personalized Medicine: Fantasy or the Future?
Didier Trono, EPFL; Stylianos Antonarakis, Geneva University Medical School
The current revolution in life sciences is advertised as the first step towards a fundamental change in healthcare - in which medicine will morph from an essentially reactive and often empirical discipline to a Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory endeavor. Our individual risk factors will be identified to assess the probability of developing diseases and design appropriate prophylactic measures, while our ills will be treated with highly specific interventions based on their precise molecular fingerprinting rather than their assignment to overly general classes of pathologies. But how tangible are these promises? What scientific, technological, regulatory and ethical hurdles stand in the way? And what are the economic implications of "4P" medicine for future healthcare systems? These questions and more will be tackled during this afternoon insight session.
Managerial Philosophy: What Does Thinking Mean
Jacques Horovitz, IMD Faculty
Managers potentially make up to 100 decisions a day. Do they have time to think them through? What is the basis for these decisions? Do they use an inductive or deductive approach to action? More generally, how can managers take the time to think so that decision making becomes effective? This afternoon insight session will discuss the different ways in which a manager can develop his or her thinking for immediate effect.
Clip Air: A Futuristic Air-Transportation Project
The Clip-Air team, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)
Demographic and economic growth in many parts of the world is dramatically increasing mobility needs - but the impacts of energy consumption on the environment make current transportation models unsustainable. Clip-Air is a revolutionary new concept for air transportation designed to address this key challenge. The modular aircraft features detachable capsules that can be "clipped" and "unclipped" from the wing, allowing capacity to be matched to demand. This afternoon insight session discusses the advantages of this flexibility to airline and airport operations, as well as the stimulating research areas opened up by Clip-Air's modular system, including multimodal transport and new energy sources.
Beyond Juggling: Achieving a Sustainable Work-Life Balance
Suzanne de Janasz, IMD Faculty
Non-stop demands, 24/7 connectedness and a will to achieve beyond what is reasonable. No wonder employees are experiencing insurmountable conflict... and even burning out.
In this afternoon session, we use case studies (of others and ourselves), instruments and discussions to identify and reduce unnecessary complexity that complicates the work-family interface.
Wednesday:
Learning from Sub-Saharan Africa
Simon Bright, inventor of the SMS-shortcode anti-counterfeiting system; Joshua Ngoma, founding member and CEO, Tranter Holdings Group; Chiedu Osakwe, Director, WTO Accessions Division
By 2050 the population of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will have surpassed that of India and China. Yet unlike these two Asian giants, SSA, with the exception of commodity exports, has not been a prominent actor in the current era of globalization. Nevertheless, in many respects the region is booming - giving reason to believe that an 'African economic miracle' will emerge within a few decades. This afternoon insight session will provide an alternative view of Sub-Saharan Africa than that generally given. Focusing on demographic and economic dynamics, entrepreneurship and African approaches to corporate development and social responsibility, it forecasts a future SSA that is very different from the stereotypes.
PlanetSolar: The First World Tour Powered By Solar Energy
Raphaël Domjan, Founder & Expedition Leader, PlanetSolar
Inspired by Jules Verne, in 2004 Raphaël Domjan conceived a plan to build a fully autonomous solar-powered boat and sail it around the world. Six years later, Tûranor PlanetSolar set sail from Monaco on the first-ever voyage to circumnavigate the globe powered only by the sun. Along the way, the crew has shared their vision and passion for a clean energy future at ports around the world. Just a month after completing this epic journey, Mr Domjan will share his experience and highlight the importance of sustainable renewable energy.
Frugal Innovations
Pasha Mahmood, IMD Faculty
From $2500 cars to $35 laptops, frugal innovations characterize the art of improvising effective solutions using limited resources. As many developed economies face economic downturn, multinational corporations from these countries need to look to emerging economies for ways to do more for less, while serving broader markets. Detailed examples of companies like Tata in India, Haier in China, and Cemex in Mexico illustrate the typical challenges for frugal innovations and show how firms can overcome these challenges.
From Product to Service in B2B Markets
Wolfgang Ulaga, IMD Faculty
Today, many B2B firms actively grow beyond their traditional product core through value-added services and customer solutions. But this move cannot be achieved through a few "cosmetic changes" or a swift "repackaging" of a firm's offers. Many companies often experience mixed results in implementing service growth strategies and wrestle with strong internal resistance to change. The transition requires strong commitment from top management and a transformation of a product-centric business model a broader and richer go-to-market model integrating products, services and customer solutions.
This afternoon insight session will explore the success factors that B2B companies need to master when moving from products to service(s) in industrial markets. To this end, we draw on lessons learned from our study of large industry leaders in diverse markets about how to escape the commodity trap and grow successfully in value-added services and customer solutions. Managers can use our framework and service typology to audit their companies' strengths and weaknesses and define trajectories for how to grow their firms' industrial service portfolios over time.
Thursday:
Consumer Privacy and the Internet: Opponents or Complements?
Ralf Boscheck, IMD Faculty; Mike Wade, IMD Faculty
New online technologies rely heavily on the collection and usage of personal data, for example to make advertising more relevant, searches more precise, and online interactions more personal. At the same time, the privacy of such information ranks as the number one concern in multiple consumer surveys - and regulators are racing to catch up with changing technologies and markets. This afternoon insight session will look at the issue of consumer privacy and the Internet from three different, and not always complementary, perspectives: a technological perspective focusing on what is possible; a regulatory perspective looking at what is (and is not) being implemented in key jurisdictions; and a business perspective on what opportunities are available to create value from consumer information, both now and in the future.
Learning from Private Equity
Mark Corbidge, Co-Head of Private Equity, Doughty Hanson & Co; John Leahy Co-Head of Private Equity, Doughty Hanson & Co
Private equity, in its most traditional incarnation, relied heavily on leverage to create value. With the recent disaggregation of the global credit markets, the industry's business model - and the payday of some of its key players - has been put into question by some observers. So where is the industry today? Is leverage still a key driver of value creation? This afternoon insight session will answer these questions.
Fast Food at the Bottom of the Pyramid
S. Venkatesh, CEO Goli Vada Pav
Goli Vada Pav is one of the hottest start-ups in the Indian food industry. Providing a hygienically produced, yet competitively priced, alternative to traditional hot-food snacks sold by street hawkers, the company's status as a highly promising business was recently validated by a Rs. 21 crore (US$ 4.7 million) investment by an Indian venture capital firm. This afternoon insight session will share the company's bold and unconventional approach to winning one of the biggest prizes in the food industry - customers at the bottom of the pyramid in India.
New Organizational Competencies for the World of Tomorrow
Michael Yaziji, IMD Faculty
Resource depletion, increasing regulation, broader sets of more powerful stakeholders with new dynamics, and the opportunities arising from institutional gaps in developing markets are fundamentally changing the environment in which firms operate. Entirely new competencies are going to be required from tomorrow's successful companies. In this session we'll explore these trends and their implications for you and your firm.
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Afternoon insight sessions
