A consulting company would charge an arm and a leg to do some of these projects, he says. With MBA Enterprise, you get the students and an experienced faculty member for the same price. Dr. Charles Lamb is also a supporter of the program. I know that each client of projects I have supervised has implemented at least some of the recommendations of the student consultants, he says. To date, the MBA Enterprise program has helped numerous businesses solve issues ranging from corporate finance to marketing image.
Most businesses are local, but some are international.
In 1999, a team of four students from the MBA Enterprise program participated in a project for igus GmbH, a German company owned by Frank Blas who is a 1981 graduate of TCU s MBA program. Joerg Schneider, a 2000 MBA graduate, discovered this before he went to work at his dream job as a junior portfolio manager for DEKA, a large German investment fund company. The 1999 project Schneider worked on for Blas was not the first for igus Gmbh. The CEO has hired three MBA Enterprise teams to research potential ventures, most recently a company acquisition and a phantom stock plan. While you don t get a full blueprint of everything, you get a great value for the fee and points that help you in thinking things through, he says.