For the first time in a while Fountainebleu woke up to rain. The heat had surpassed, atleast for a while. For the students this didn’t matter because they had a busy day ahead. We started with a class from Prof. Ron Adner about innovation strategy. He used the story of apples growth from 2001 to the present day one trillion-dollar market capitalization to highlight the importance of innovation and also timing your innovation. He was also generous enough to give each student of his book “The wide lens” which also talks about innovation.
After the counsellors William, Maxim and Nora took their own initiative and held a quick presentation about gender equality. The point was to highlight the subtle differences in behavior when dealing with the other gender, whether it be talking over someone or not taking them as serious.
Then it was time to go back to Nottingham as we continued the YFCD simulation, well this time the place was Friedrichshafen, Germany. The management teams had been flown here to participate the annual Eurobike show. This is where all bike enthusiasts, retailers and suppliers come to showcase their product or to check out the new advancements in the industry. The students were just about to launch their new Cylo-X bike and they were there to showcase it. The counsellors played all kinds of different customers and the students had to do face-to-face sales with these sometimes even ridiculous characters. Someone was a famous Youtube star and someone a private equity fund manager trying to conduct a hostile takeover of the company.
Students presenting their strategy
One of the students, Olly, had this to say about the bikefair:
“It was very interesting to really see what I was like to do sales under pressure. The great thing was that we could run through each other’s faults and positives after speaking to the “customers”. This safe environment was an ideal place to learn how to pitch a sale in a real-life situation”