This week is innovation week for IMD’s MBAs. IMD Professor Cyril Bouquet and a team of experts are leading the MBAs on visits to local hospitals, innovation hubs, creation labs and more to go through a real world process of innovation, because as Cyril says: “You can’t learn innovation in a classroom”. There are 111 participants are immersed in this intensive MBA innovation module – 89 MBA candidates, 4 students from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and 18 students from ECAL.
This year IMD is combining its strengths with outstanding partners from the region EPFL – the renowned technology university – and ECAL – the acclaimed school of design. Each team will be harnessing the power of business, design and technology.
The participants are tasked with improving the lives of healthcare patients and they are participating in the Debiopharm-Inartis challenge, which rewards winning ideas with funding to follow through on their development.
“On the second exploration day of our innovation week adventure, we were ‘deployed in the field’. In our teams we split to look for innovations across the entire value chain of the healthcare system. We consulted professors, nurses, researchers, medical doctors, specialists, owners of testing laboratories. We visited array of different sites in the Lausanne healthcare ecosystem: the main Lausanne hospital CHUV, specialty lab Unilabs, biomedical research workplace CLE – Centre Laboratoire d’Epalinges, firefighters and Brain Mind at EPFL,” wrote MBA Candidate Martina Skodova.
“This is a dream collaboration with excellent schools from the region. It will enhance the innovation experience for IMD’s MBAs and will give ECAL and EPFL students an unforgettable immersion into the innovation process and the world of business,” said Cyril Bouquet.
ECAL Director Alexis Georgacopoulos said: “This collaboration with IMD is very important for us, because a school of higher education in art and design such as ECAL continuously sets itself new challenges to offer its students solutions to contemporary issues while remaining forward-looking. In this way, this project is a perfect opportunity for students of both institutions to explore new horizons, in which business and design are serving innovation.”
“As a business school, IMD generates impact, and as a foundation, Inartis is concerned not only with ideas but with helping seeing them to fruition and that there will be a return for society. That’s what this challenge is all about. Inartis brings a strong network which can help the innovations that come out of this challenge to life,” said Benoît Dubuis, President of the Inartis Foundation, addressing the IMD, EPFL and ECAL participants.
IMD also recently launched a new program with EPFL – TransformTECH and a partnership with ECAL.
Find out more about IMD’s MBA.
