NANYANG FELLOWS MBA

This diverse Nanyang Fellows MBA team helped an ethanol company enter the motorsports industry

To discover unexplored but promising solutions, you need to draw from a wide variety of perspectives.

Tan Yan Yan, Samuel Wong Kok Kai, and their Nanyang Fellows MBA groupmates tested this principle in practice. Their multidisciplinary team explored bioethanol’s potential as a more sustainable fuel for motorsports – finding what their mentor Prof Gemma Calvert calls “new areas of opportunity.”

Yan Yan, Samuel, and the rest of the team came together under Nanyang’s Strategy Projects at Nanyang (SPAN) programme, a nine-month senior consultancy project that tasked them with solving a sponsor company’s real-world problem.

In the capstone SPAN project, team diversity is a key feature: each member leveraged their unique skills and backgrounds to foster innovative solutions and insights.

Exploring bioethanol’s potential role in sustainability for the motorsports industry

This team’s sponsor company was Marquis Energy Global Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based, sustainability-focused company that produces and distributes low-carbon-intensity bioethanol, Distillers Dried Grains (DDGs), and related commodities.

Each SPAN team member had strong foundations in their respective industries, but none of them had any prior experience with either the ethanol or motorsports industries.

However, they had the help of Prof Gemma Calvert, a prominent figure in the field of neuroscience and a pioneer of neuromarketing. As their mentor, she provided guidance that bridged the team’s knowledge gaps in these specialised sectors.

“I believe the role of a mentor is multi-faceted,” Prof Gemma says. “We help students to navigate complex problems and offer solutions and guidance based on our own, real-world experiences.”

Beyond their relative inexperience, the team had other factors to consider. “Feasibility, scalability, and impact were constantly on our minds,” Yan Yan shares. “We needed to think innovatively, as the motorsports industry is very established and might not be easy for a newcomer to break into.”

The motorsports industry is also quite broad, adding to the difficulty of pinpointing the best strategies to adopt. “One of the key challenges was dealing with ambiguity in the project, such as narrowing down the project direction, deciding which motorsports space to penetrate and how to enter this market,” Samuel explains.

How the team made the most of its diversity

To compensate for their lack of experience, the Nanyang Fellows MBA team displayed a good grasp of each member’s aptitude for certain topics or tasks, having known each other for a while before banding together for the SPAN project.

“Over the course of two trimesters, we have cultivated a better understanding of each other’s strengths,” Samuel states.

The team adopted a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy for the project, as Samuel calls it: “For example, we would appoint a member in charge of project management, and another to engage the project sponsor, and so on.”

This, Samuel says, ensured each task was assigned according to each member’s individual expertise. “Each of us knew our role within the team,” he explains.

Yan Yan feels similarly about their team dynamics. “We shared our strengths and leveraged them to ensure that the project proceeded smoothly.”

For instance, the team’s Indonesian aerospace professional Muchamad Musyafa served as the team’s technical advisor due to his knowledge on fuel efficiency. Meanwhile, tech professional Neha Agarwal “could dive deeper into the topic” thanks to her “keen interest in sustainability,” according to Yan Yan.

To tell their project’s story, Jean De Dieu Uwihanganye, a diplomatic officer from Rwanda, contributed by “pulling narratives together” and helping teammates improve in presenting.

Based on his track record, Samuel, a civil servant, was appointed the team’s leader. As a “very structured and organised” person, he kept everyone on track. “I undertook the role of architecting our project roadmap, and crafted the project plan tasks, timelines, and resource allocations for each phase,” he says.

Finally, Yan Yan’s planning experience at a statutory board overseeing social services in Singapore made her an excellent facilitator for their brainstorming sessions. She also “read widely” and shared her ideas with her teammates “to see if they were feasible and something to explore deeper.”

Turning a lack of experience into a unique advantage

The team undertook extensive research to supplement their knowledge on the project’s target industries.

“The motorsports and bioethanol industries were very new to me,” Yan Yan shares. “I had to bring myself up to speed about the developments in these two industries very quickly and understand how these industries operated.”

The same was true for the rest of the team. “We had to conduct extensive desktop research to gain a comprehensive understanding of biofuel, specifically ethanol, and the available motorsports races to recommend,” Samuel says.

The SPAN team turned their outsider perspective into an advantage – they were able to “harness their distinct areas of expertise to solve problems… in sectors very different from their own,” as Prof Gemma puts it.

“Every SPAN group is composed of a unique set of skill sets and business experiences,” she explains. “I’m often impressed how quickly and seamlessly teams are able to integrate their expertise and insights into their project solutions.”

Such insights prove to be incredibly valuable to corporations that participate in the SPAN programme. “The greatest value for corporations is having a group of relatively young, smart and eager minds examine their business challenges from a fresh perspective and typically without an industry bias,” Prof Gemma adds. “We often learn as much from them as they do from us.”

Finding solutions via unexplored, fresh perspectives

According to Yan Yan, Marquis Energy Global (MEG) initially doubted their company could break into the motorsports industry. Fortunately, the team’s fresh perspectives allowed them to find solutions to this problem.

The team “formulated a market penetration report with recommendations on how to penetrate the motorsports industry,” according to Samuel.

Yan Yan specified the four entry options that their team identified for the client: providing sustainable fuel to F1 race cars, supporting F1 logistics to meet sustainability goals, partnering with a potential new F1 host country, and leveraging F1’s existing partnerships to break into the F1 community.

The team also came up with a power and influence diagram of the motorsports industry, Yan Yan adds.

Finally, the team formulated an “industry mid-term plan regarding sustainability goals and key insight from interviews, which opened possibilities and provided us with the affirmation to proceed,” Samuel explains.

According to Yan Yan, the client was “very pleased and surprised with our recommendations.”

“We wanted to commend the F1 Team for their innovative approach in accessing the highly exclusive and private F1 market,” says MEG. “Their ability to think outside the box and secure phenomenal insider information, typically inaccessible, significantly enhanced the depth of their analysis.”

“Additionally, the Team’s prior industry experience and strategic insight were evident in their well-informed recommendations. Their ability to leverage their network and provide practical solutions added significant value to the project,” they add.

After the programme, MEG requested a link-up with the motorsports stakeholders, Samuel adds.

Diversity = discoveries

Despite their differences, the team’s diversity is what led them to successfully completing their SPAN project.

“We were a very cohesive team,” Yan Yan shares, “very motivated and excited about the possibility of coming up with feasible solutions to meet the needs of our clients.”

The team’s conflict resolution skills also helped them leverage their diverse opinions. “When divergent viewpoints arose, we prioritised open communication, respectfully sharing our perspectives and actively listening to each other’s insights,” Samuel explains.

He also shares a similar sentiment regarding professional relationships of all kinds. “Understanding the dynamics of relationships and aligning ourselves with the same wavelength and value proposition as our counterparts is paramount to effective engagement,” he shares.

On that note, Prof Gemma felt that, overall, it “was an extremely successful exercise for all parties.” 

SPAN is the capstone module of the Nanyang Fellows MBA programme, a specially curated full-time or part-time programme designed for public sector senior leaders as well as private sector individuals with a keen interest in the public sector.

Interested in Nanyang Fellows MBA programme and SPAN? Click here to learn more.