NANYANG MBA

Paintball – An event whose name was later changed to “Painball”!

Submitted by Vivek Negi, Co-Chair of the Sports Club

Date: 16^th November 2014

Activity Organizers: Nanyang MBA Sports Club (Vivek and Aditya)

Participants: Total 24 — 17 MBA Full-time, 2 MBA Part-timer, 3 Exchange Students, 2 Partners

We gathered at the bus stand near the Graduate Halls to wait for the bus at 9:30am. After a late night outing the previous night, some people found it hard to get up early (it was early for a Sunday). Mr Exco President turned up looking like a zombie.

The venue was at the School of Paintball which is near NTU and it took us around 10 minutes to reach there. The paintball arena was about size of a football field and there were bags filled with air kept at different positions to create hiding places in the battleground.

The organizer gave us safety instructions and told us the rules of the game. Then the organizers made a statement that those who were not feeling manly could wear a protective vest. This statement forced guys to go without the vest and take shots on the body.

The 24 participants were divided into 4 teams and each team was distinguished by a different coloured face mask. There were 3 plastic pods near the centre of the field and teams had to compete to get the pods in their possession.

The teams made strategies giving different roles to different team members. Some people went all out shooting wildly while others were very calculative and played safe. In the first round, Teams 1 and 2 played against each other, and Teams 3 and 4 played in the next game.

The respective winning teams played against each other to declare supremacy and the two losing teams also played against each other. Lot of paintballs did not burst and just ricocheted off players’ bodies leaving painful marks. Those body marks changed the girls’ fashion for the next 2 weeks. Now the event has become known as “Painball”!

Overall, it was great fun and left us with loads of memories (and bruises).

Teams 1&2:

Teams 3&4:

For more information about Nanyang Business School click here.

NANYANG MBA

Sports Activities Day

Submitted by Vivek Negi, Co-Chair of the Sports Club

Date: 8^th November 2014

Activity Organizers: – Nanyang MBA Sports Club (Vivek and Aditya)

Participants: 13 MBA (Full-time and Part-time), 3 Exchange Students, 1 MBA (Part-time previous batch)

Venue: Sport & Recreation Centre

Games: Tennis, Futsal, Slackline

After finishing our poster presentations for one of our elective courses during recess week, the Nanyang MBA cohort was full of energy and went to play sports at the school’s S&RC.

We started the sports afternoon with tennis. Boon Huei was providing expert help to novices like Anand who soon found that the tennis ball was too small to play with.

While some were enjoying tennis under the sun, a group shifted to the futsal court. It was great fun to play in a small court but soon people started feeling drained as the energy and intensity of the game was immense. Even though there was shade, the heat and humidity was high. We took frequent breaks to rehydrate ourselves.

Finally the heat and humidity took its toll and we packed up. Some left to cool down in the swimming pool while the adventurous ones stayed behind to experience slacklining thanks to Herve. It was fun to watch someone on slackline trying to maintain balance. It looked as if the person was swimming, dancing, making tai chi poses in air.

For more information about Nanyang Business School click here.

NANYANG MBA

StartMEup Session 1 – Turn Ideas into Action

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.

NANYANG MBA

Nanyang Business School Goes To Myanmar for Business Study Mission

Submitted by Raymond Rueda, Student Exco VP Career Development

Myanmar, compared to its Asian counterparts, has been lagging behind for decades in terms of socio-economic and political stability but thanks to U Thein Sein’s rise to presidency in 2011, it has now opened its doors to the global market, bringing in investors from various industries.  Multinational companies see its huge potential—it is strategically located between Asian countries with huge populations—India and China—and is next to some developing Southeast Asian nations as well such as Thailand.

Because of these factors, the Nanyang Business School has chosen Myanmar for the second time as a destination for its students’ Business Study Mission (BSM), which was scheduled last October 25 to November 1.  Now on its second year, the redesigned MBA program requires participants to go on a BSM either in Singapore or overseas.  This year, 11 full-time students, 3 part-time students, and 1 EMBA participant joined the Myanmar group, which visited both local and multinational companies with offices in Yangon.

A trip abroad, however, would not be complete without sight-seeing so the BSM also had its fun side.  During the first two days, we visited popular tourist spots in Yangon such as the Inle Lake, Botataung Pagoda, the Rangoon War Cemetery, the Shwedagon Pagoda, and Bogyoke Market.  We also tried out local Burmese dishes in popular restaurants in the city and found them uniquely delicious.

After a weekend of touring the city came the more serious part of the trip—the company visits. Companies that the group got the chance to interact with include Chevrolet, Consumer Goods Myanmar Limited, Tokyo Stock Exchange, Samsung, Coca-Cola Pinya Beverages, Ooredoo, Kia Motors, Schneider Electric, CNQC, and Petronas.  Aside from the private sector, officials from the government and non-profit institutions also gave insightful presentations about the current challenges, opportunities, and programs being promoted in Myanmar.

Seeing Myanmar suffering from poverty and corruption is quite saddening especially when one learns that it used to be the the second wealthiest in the region during the British occupation.  Nevertheless, it is slowly making progress especially as it gains support from more powerful countries such as the US and Japan.  All of us saw how promising Myanmar could be and we hope that one day, we will see it as competitive as or even more developed than its neighboring countries in the region.

To Prof. Ravi Agarwal, Prof. Chung Lai Hong, Ms. Lindsay Tan of the MBA Office, and everyone else who made the Myanmar BSM possible, chezu tinbade!

For more information about Nanyang Business School click here.