Going Global…Virtually: IB Agility Labs– Marketing

Screenshot of our team during the recording of our presentation.

1. Describe your experience in the International Business Agility Labs. What was the best part of your experience? What surprised you about your experience?

Simply put—this was truly one unique experience. Having the opportunity to collaborate with students from France, Spain, and Pakistan is not the usual type of case competition a student gets to participate in. My team consisted of three University of Maryland students and two Lahore School of Economics students from Pakistan and from the start we were excited to work with one another and tackle the problem. The best part of my experience was being able to combine my academic experiences and knowledge and put it into practice by consulting a startup in Portugal. It’s a unique experience that was available because of the pandemic, and the Center for Global Business used that as an opportunity to connect students from across the globe—that’s something I’m so appreciative of. The surprising part was how integrated the project was. It didn’t feel like it was Smith plus other schools, but instead four strong business schools coming together to put on a global experience for all of our students. It was amazing to collaborate with students from these different schools and collaborate together.

2. What challenges did you face during this program and what Global Mindsetcompetencies did you use to overcome them?

One of the challenges our team ran into was the ambiguity of the project and the time difference. At first, the case seemed broad—find a monetization strategy and a go-to-market plan for the next 6 months. Collaborating to make this large task more manageable was the first step to addressing the challenge and understanding how to tolerate ambiguity enabled us to do so. In addition, the time difference (9 hours!) made it difficult to find time to meet that wasn’t too late for our teammates or too early for us at Smith. Being adaptable was key, and I can’t thank our peers from Lahore enough for staying up past midnight, so we had enough time to work on the case and film our presentation.

3. What was something that you learned from your participation in this program that you may not have learned otherwise?

It was interesting to see how business is conducted internationally, specifically how different schools and cultures give business presentations. We quickly learned we needed to establish how we give presentations in our respective schools in order to ensure our presentation and recommendations were both comprehensive and clear. The cross-cultural experience allowed us to pull from the strengths of our own communities to consult the start-up in Lisbon, Portugal.

4. What has this experience taught you about working on multinational teams?

Communication is key. We can’t go into a multinational team with an assumption that we are all starting at the same place. We need to establish what those “basic understandings” are—whether that be how we give presentations, what messaging or terms we should use, etc. Setting the ground layer early on in a multinational team ensures we have a base to propel off of, and this experience taught me the importance of clear communication early on.

5. What advice would you give a student considering participating in this program?

Nike puts it best—just do it. With only three synchronous days and a week total of participation, it’s a low barrier to entry with high rewards in terms of academic and global growth. Take the week, join an IB agility lab, meet some great students overseas, and enhance your global mindset. Put theory into action and go global.