Submitted by Anggono Natalnugroho, Co-Chair of the Marketing & Entrepreneurship Club

About twenty entrepreneurial like-minded people, an equal mix of MBA and graduate students, attended the StartMEup session last Friday, 21 November, at The Nest Theatre, Innovation Center. This event is organised by the Marketing & Entrepreneurship (ME) Club, supported by NTUitive, the university’s innovation and enterprise company. StartMEup aims to seed collaboration between business graduates and technologists, and meets them up with startups and support networks all over Singapore.

Swarnajeet Mukherjee, a serial entrepreneur, opened the session with the keynote topic “Turn Ideas into Action”. He suggested the importance of starting a business before a venture. Essentially, it means a startup should start as early as possible executing the idea, getting initial customers, serving them the best we can, getting feedback from them, then once the business is stable, we may start to think about a venture, i.e. getting funding from venture capitalists, etc. Another important thing he stressed on is about partnership. For instance, if we start a business selling an innovative pencil, then our impact will be amplified if we can also partner with a startup who sells books. Partnering with complementary product is a way to scale up our business faster. Think this as Network Economy.

The second guest was Fang Kok Boon, chief executive of Blacksmith, the world’s first rotary 3D printer startup. He spoke on the topic of sharing secret ideas. In short, we should not be paranoid in sharing our ideas to everyone, with only two exceptions — Do not share your idea with a venture capitalist who invests in startups like yours, and do not share to those who have the same area of interest as you, obviously. About Blacksmith, he was inspired by an old turntable record player when prototyping the rotary 3D printer by himself at home. Supported by NTUitive, he successfully funded his idea via Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform, in just June this year. Currently in production, this 3D printer will be sold at $2,999. Pretty reasonable, right?

The third speaker was Steve Wah, CEO of Smoov, an online payment gateway like Paypal, but focuses on SME in the Southeast Asia region (now operates in Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines). You would think that it is crazy to get into an already fragmented payment apps market. However, Smoov’s offering is not just another app. It offers a very unique proposition, a platform for SME, which would not be taken away even by Apple Pay or Google Wallet. A very sound business model, just like what we learn as business students about strategy.

The final speaker of the session was Frankie Lee, representing NTUitive. He explained about the technology and support available from the Innovation Center. This is the guy you want to talk to if you plan to start your own business after graduation. NTUitive has been established for a very long time and enjoyed success from the beginning (at that time it was under the name of NTU Ventures). Frankie is a Nanyang MBA alumni and owns more than 2 startups since graduated. You can tell he is very passionate about entrepreneurship. Most of the attendees came to connect with him after the event.

The ME Club realises that entrepreneurship is not for everyone. Perhaps very few of MBA participants will start up their own business after graduation. Nevertheless, NTU offers many opportunities for startups. Hence, the ME Club tries to optimise the available resources, technology, funding and network of talents for developing an entrepreneurship culture in the Nanyang MBA. We hope it can inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs.

The ME Club Co-Chairs would like to thank Vivek Negi (the last minute MC), Trung, Jiajia, and Liu Lei for their ideas, feedback and moral support, and NTUitive for connecting us to the startups.

For more information about Nanyang Business School click here.

Submitted by I Putu Mahendra Wijaya, Co-Chair of the Management Consulting Club

Hitachi Global Solution Corporate Talk by Mr. Michael Travis, Chairman Emeritus

On Friday, 14 November 2014, the Nanyang Business School has been fortunate to receive a visit from Mr. Michael Travis, chairman emeritus from Hitachi Solutions Ltd. The Management Consulting Club, together with the Wine Appreciation Club, has been honored for being given the trust to host him throughout his visit in Nanyang Business School.

The event started at 15h30 with a presentation by Mr Travis titled “Consulting & Professional Services Perspectives”. Within the presentation, Mr Travis shared with the attendants of his experience heading Hitachi Global Solution, as well as some the recent important trends in the professional service industry.

Some of the interesting insights that he shared is the scale and revenue partition of Hitachi as a conglomerate company. Founded in 1910 by an engineer Namihei Odaira, Hitachi has grown from its initial business in electric induction motors into large conglomerate in Japanese industry. As of 2014, Hitachi businesses encompass areas from Digital Media all the way to Construction Machinery. No doubt that Hitachi has been recognized in the world as one of consistently top performing companies, as evidenced by its annual subscription to be listed in Fortune 500 global companies. As of Financial year 2013, Hitachi reported top line revenue of $93.4 billion from all of its business units, one of which is Hitachi Global Solutions, which Mr Travis had the experience to lead & grow the business.

Furthermore, Mr. Travis also shared his insight about the future of consulting industry. One of the important trends, he pointed out, happens in the sphere of IT development. In particular, he argued that the development of the “internet of things: manufacturing 2.0” – where machine can have “social network” between them – would unleash a tremendous potential in the manufacturing in the new world.

Important around the idea of internet of things is the capability of machine to collect data, thanks to proliferation of sensor, and processes them in real-time to be presented either to another machine – which would help crunch those data – or to a human user – who will make the final  critical decision in real-time if any intervention is needed. Such real-time data gathering & information processing will bring efficiency to a level never before attained in the past, simply because the availability of data which were not present.

As such, the development of internet of things becomes not only the latest fad in the technology world, but could have a tremendous impact in the sphere of strategic planning and decision making in the business world, particularly in the sector of manufacturing and public transportation.  Indeed, one of the key takeaways from the presentation is the implication of the internet of things to the consulting industry: we can expect that the internet of things would create a middle-field battle ground between companies that traditionally offers services in strategic consulting, and those that customarily offers services in IT consulting.

After an interesting presentation, the attendants were then entertained with a fine selection of wines, cherry-picked by our wine connoisseur, Ms Stephanie Zhao – c0-chair of Wine Appreciation Club; accompanied with excellent light snack matched against the wine, finely selected by our caterer Fusion Spoon. All in all, the atmosphere of the entire session was very collegiate, and we were very fortunate to have the opportunity to talk in person with someone as important as Mr Travis.

Indeed, the Management Consulting Club and Wine Appreciation Club hope that the event could mark as the beginning of long-term relationship between the Nanyang MBA program & Hitachi Global Solutions.  Bonne Continuation!

For more information about Nanyang Business School click here.