Looking Back: Block Seminar 2023 with Hilti
As part of the students’ compulsory CEMS MIM curriculum, this year’s Block Seminar’s topic “Establishing an online marketplace presence – define suitable partner and prepare a launch strategy” was prepared in cooperation with CEMS Corporate Partner, Hilti, for a group of 29 students of 12 nationalities coming from 8 CEMS partner universities.
The whole seminar has been supervised by Ladislav Tyll, MBA, PhD, CEMS Academic Director, Jan Wegert, eCommerce Manager CEE & Middle East at Colgate-Palmolive, and Serhiy Bobrytskyy, Business Development Manager for CEE & Middle East at Colgate-Palmolive. For Hilti, they were Jan Borský, Channels Manager, Tomáš Zeidler, Head of Digital (EE-EU), Judita Bihellerová, HR Director, and Ivana Botošová, HR Manager.
Programme expectations
- The goal of the block seminar was to understand and analyse B2B and B2C online marketplaces present in the local digital space, assess their suitability to Hilti strategy and suggest a launch portfolio for the first year. A comparison of different marketplaces, their business models, fees, logistics, data access and brand/marketing alignment was also expected.
- The rich programme required the students to gain a deeper understanding on the following questions:
What types of online marketplaces are available in the given country? What are their advantages/disadvantages? How do they fulfil Hilti marketplace prerequisites? Which marketplace would you recommend and why? What would be the required resource allocation to execute the launch and manage such a marketplace? Which products are most suitable to be launched first?
On the first day of the Block Seminar, a visit to Hilti’s office outside of Prague was scheduled as an introduction to the company values, insights into eCommerce and problem definition to deepen the students‘ knowledge to get the best project outputs and feasibility.
From then on, the students attended lectures and get-togethers to work on the project in teams to get ready for the presentation day by their designated regions.
Final presentations and winner announcement
On the last day of the seminar, 5 student teams divided into regions (Baltic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic) turned their week-long efforts into final presentations that they delivered before a jury made of Hilti and VŠE representatives, who then announced the winner after their careful deliberations. The jury’s pick went to team #3 (region Poland), whose members were Maria Neto Carreira Grothausen Martins Inês, David Knorr, Zuzana Kosturiakova, Tanguy de Lamartinie, Felipe Andrés Huerta Pineda and Yuqi Zhang.
The Block Seminar was wrapped up by a sit-down dinner in the Academic Club (Restaurace AK VŠE), where the winning team was awarded.
VŠE representatives would hereby like to extend their gratitude to Hilti and all stakeholders for their contribution to this successful seminar.
In case of your interest, see the photo gallery.
Information about the past Block Seminars can be found on this website.
>>> Applying to CEMS School of the Year 2022 <<<
The admission procedure for the CEMS/Master in Management Programme at VSE offers 2 intakes.
Please note that admissions for the AY 2024/25 will open in November 2023.
The 1st intake deadline is on February 28, 2024, upon which selected students have to pass the assessment centre.
The 2nd intake is subject to available spots, the deadline is on April 30, 2024.
Students have to submit the required documents before the application deadline.
