Ranked #1 in the World
by Aaron Wilder ‘08, Development Fellow
The Thunderbird Emerging Markets Laboratory (TEM-Lab) is a capstone course to be launched in early 2010 offering students an opportunity to apply the full range of professional skills they have acquired during their studies. TEM-Lab consists of participation in a consulting project for a client organization in an emerging market country anywhere in the world after the completion of the prerequisite Organizational Consulting course. TEM-Lab serves all sectors: governmental, for-profit, and nonprofit.
The Organizational Consulting course (3 academic credits) will include in-classroom discussion and lectures, case analyses, experiential learning events, critical thinking skill-building exercises, and a consultancy practicum. The consulting practicum for this course, conducted on-campus, involves assignments focusing on organizational challenges faced by local, regional, and national organizations.
The Emerging Markets Practicum (6 academic credits), will involve assigning teams to consultancy projects in-country in emerging market economies. These teams are composed of students who have completed the Organizational Consulting course as a prerequisite and will have client organizations native to the country in which they are situated.
The in-country consulting projects will be for a period of approximately six weeks. While project type will depend on the organization and its needs, projects are likely to involve a number of activities for organizations including the following:
- Local and regional business infrastructure development
- Organizational capacity development
- Marketing strategies
- Supply chain management
- Strategic planning
- Sophisticated research
- Sustainable value creation
Work experience, knowledge of the project field or culture, and language skills will be capitalized upon in the creation of the best team of approximately five students per project. The student teams will have flexibility in their internal structure, goal setting, and communication with host organizations. In-country student teams will be supported significantly via video, voice, and Internet coaching by Thunderbird faculty having familiarity with the discipline-based knowledge relevant to each project.
Each student team will design an action plan with measurable goals specifically tailored to the project, host organization, and larger societal characteristics within the area of their service as part of the project preparation process. Students will evaluate their own progress on this action plan in a self-assessment deliverable. After project completion, individual students will evaluate the contributions of their fellow teammates, the Program Director will evaluate team performance as a whole, the client organization will evaluate their level of satisfaction with the student team, and the students will evaluate the receptiveness and professionalism of their assigned client organization. Students will be evaluated against a number of in-country assignment learning outcomes that may include the following:
- Development of exceptional problem definition and consulting skills.
- Increased ability to gather data in the field, potentially in extremely challenging environments.
- Increased knowledge of social capital and how to create and build it.
- Deliver practical, innovative, and culturally sensitive recommendations for products, services, or processes of host organizations in writing or through formal presentations.
- Increased cross-cultural and relationship building skills as well as the ability to overcome resistance to innovation and change.
Team sponsorships will be secured via contributions from corporations and non-governmental organizations with well-defined social and economic interests in emerging markets. The teams will provide consulting services in the funding organization’s name as they build economic capacity for emerging market client organizations. A sponsorship will cover all team travel, room, and board expenses on the ground for the duration of their project. Additionally, gifts of any amount could be earmarked for annual support of TEM-Lab which would pay for the program faculty and staff expenses, travel, and technology to facilitate virtual communications between program staff and the in-country student teams.
Establishing a TEM-Lab endowment will further enable Thunderbird to build TEM-Lab as a strong brand in itself. By covering all program costs upfront while pledging contributions to create a program endowment, a donor will allow Thunderbird to capitalize on the program’s success to continue fundraising for annual or endowment purposes and will provide a long-term foundation to draw sponsorships.
It is with great pleasure and anticipation that we welcome your gifts of support for a program that keeps on giving every year to student experiences and to build prosperity throughout the world.
Leave a Reply