Tag: GPS



The project my team and I have been assigned to work on is centered around the growing eBike market in Europe. GPS Tuner, our client, is a big player in Europe in providing GPS navigation to bicycles. GPS Tuner wants us to explore an entry into providing software and GPS to the eBike. In addition, our Hungarian professor Kristian Orban taught, and we successfully applied, a Mutually Exclusive and Completely Exhaustive (MECE) framework for the project. That framework allowed us to come up with hypotheses that we will test over the summer to give GPS Tuner the best recommendations when turning in the final project.

Guest Blogger, James Bierman, MBA’16, is a student in Cliff Holekamp’s Venture Consulting course. Student teams are currently working with startups in Budapest, Hungary.

The introduction to the project was very interesting. The CEO of GPS Tuner, Tamas Nagy, made quite the impression when first meeting him. You could tell that he was decisive and strategic. He was a natural salesman and a leader. You could tell that his staff looked up to him. His leadership style reminded me of some of the best styles that I had seen in construction. He might challenge one of his staff. However, he didn’t do it as a commandeering boss, but rather as a way to challenge them to be better. He was leading our team in the same manner and he really inspired us to do a good job.

However, the best part of the project was learning the critical thinking taught by Prof. Orban. I really liked how he focused on the framework to solve all the projects that the teams are doing. It forces us to actually use a formalized framework to solve a problem. Our team actually used the MECE framework and combined it with a “Pick-axe” method taught to us by Prof. Jackson Nickerson. While it seemed less productive at the time, when we were done, we had broken the project into manageable chunks, and we had done so in a completely exhaustive way.

For me, this project and the CELect course have put case studies into perspective. I’ve come to learn from working with these companies that the reason that case studies are so important is because CEO’s have to constantly be solving things analogous to case studies. Strategy can largely consist of addressing these projects as they come up in the company. The projects are the pivots, or the problems that need to be addressed to keep a company growing or accelerating its growth. One day I hope I am the CEO of my own start-up company and what I’ve learned from Professor Orban and Tamas will serve me well.

Pictured above, left to right: Elise Miller, Micah Northcutt, James Bierman, and Charlotte Jones in Budapest.  The first three are MBA students, Charlotte is a BSBA rising senior.  They are posing with an e-bike which is navigated by GPS Tuner software (their client).