Reykjavik “High Fliers”

In early summer 2017, the Full Time MBA class and first year EMBA class travelled to Reykjavik, Iceland for Smurfit’s first MBA International Consulting Project.

Stu Garrett, Yasser Matloob, Gauav Bansal and I worked on consultancy project for Reyjkavik-based start-up, Karolina Fund. Having developed their own successful crowd-funding platform with an enviable funding success rate of 74%, Karolina identified the opportunity to turn its platform into a white label engine which could be licensed to other crowdfunding platforms, creating an additional revenue stream.

Coming from the traditional environments of hospitals, utilities, banking and finance the Karolina Fund project gave our team exposure to an industry in its infancy and an exciting start-up environment.

The original scope of the assignment was to undertake a review of the company’s product and target market. However, as our scoping progressed and our interactions with our client became more frequent, we began to understand that the real scope of our assignment was to give an external opinion on whether Karolina should seek additional investment to add AI capabilities to their engine. Our client believes this would unlock a significant number of potential new uses for the company’s crowd-funding engine and become its unique selling point.

We found ourselves drawing heavily on our competitive strategy module from Semester 1. It was not long before the familiar expressions of Porter’s Five Forces, multi-sided platforms and core competences were floating around the Reykjavik innovation hub. We drew from our human resource strategy module by identifying the core competences that existed in the business and how these skills and expertise could be leveraged to achieve the company’s vision and strategy.phoyo1

We thoroughly enjoyed the discussions we had with our client where we could openly explore new ideas for his business in an open and direct manner. We were motivated by his passion and inspired by the company’s success to date. We debriefed each evening with faculty members who sometimes brought us back down to earth from our “blue sky thinking” perch by constructively challenging our ideas. This was an invaluable experience.

It would not have been an MBA study trip without networking opportunities. We got to share our experiences and challenges with over 50 members of the current MBA class, all happy to provide insights and ideas. More importantly, we got to experience networking in typical Icelandic fashion – in a circus tent with the Icelandic version of Eminem, trapeze artists descending from the apex and a special appearance by Pepper the Robot! Amidst the entertainment we met our company chairman and other members of the start-up community in Reykjavik.

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Oonagh O’Grady, Executive MBA 2016-2018