Students Challenge Each Other Remotely to Market an Electric Bike
On Friday 24 April, 16 groups of students (8 per class) were ready to battle for the whole day - studying, analyzing and making decisions like a true corporate management team. The goal was to market an electric mountain bike. A business challenge is not new in this semester of the course in Global operations and supply chain management for which Giuseppe Stabilini is coordinator.
However, this edition differed from all the previous ones: the day of the challenge involved all the syudents remotely.
The Rialto platform, which also gives its name to the business game (Rialto Global supply chain challenge) was developed by BUILT Bocconi. It is normally used by the students of the course to analyze the business results of the various business cases, on which they are then required to provide reports. At the end of the course it is used for a challenge: divided into groups in which each student plays a corporate role of management (CEO, COO, ect.) The students challenge each other in making the best business decisions to achieve the objective. This year, it was a question of marketing an electric bicycle.
"The things that impressed us positively, compared to past years," explains Stabilini, Associate professor of practice in Procurement and supply management at SDA Bocconi, who is assisted in the course by colleagues Vitaliano Fiorillo, Matteo Giuffrida and Silvia Zamboni, "are the accuracy and precision with which the work was carried out, despite everything being done and coordinated remotely". Faced with the difficulty of working remotely, "the kids immediately grasped the importance of the effectiveness of correct and precisely organized communication, an element that is taken for granted in person. The result is that they have reached a level of precision that we would not have expected. "
A unusual experience, therefore, in which the students made full use of the various technological tools for the ultimate goal: "In the end, distance was not a big problem", explains one of the students of the course, Lorenzo Marchetti. "On the other hand, even in real working environments it is not always possible to be physically together to make decisions. Rather, it was fundamental what the course itself, with the practical use of the Rialto platform, taught us: knowing how to make quick and effective decisions. When I go to a company on some tomorrow, I will already have an overall view of the job and then it will prove to be very useful ".