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What is Global Experience Week?

Often described as one of the highlights of the MBA journey at ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Business School, the Global Experience Week is an unforgettable week-long trip to a destination around the world. There, students apply their learnings in a real-world environment, working with local organisations and business leaders to tackle challenges facing local communities and businesses. It offers a first-hand insight into the local market dynamics, policy and cultural contexts that influences business.

Depending on where you travel to, you will explore a different theme – from sustainability and climate transformation to inequality and wicked business problems. Through these themes, you will find solutions to challenges facing local organisations, as well as taking new insights and learnings back to apply to your future career.

What happens during the Global Experience Week?

Each destination offers a unique itinerary tailored to the theme and country that you will be visiting, but each Global Experience Week will combine academic learning with practical experience and cultural immersion. Throughout the week, you can expect to:

• visit companies, businesses and social enterprises;
• hear from business leaders from around the world in lecture-style settings;
• interact with local communities and businesses;
• collaborate with peers from across the MBA suite, allowing you to draw from a diverse range of experience and backgrounds;
• take part in cultural activities to gain new knowledge about the country you are visiting;
• work with local companies and apply your learnings to tackle business challenges;
• explore how local market dynamics, including economic, political and cultural contexts, influence business decision making.

What skills do I develop on the Global Experience Week?

Global Experience Week is designed to help you build the practical skills and innovative mindset needed to be able to lead in an increasingly interconnected world.

Applying your MBA learnings to an international setting, you will develop:

Cross-cultural communication

You will collaborate with classmates, local organisations and business leaders from different cultures and professional backgrounds.

Leadership and collaboration

You will analyse complex business challenges, explore solutions, sharing perspectives and presenting practical recommendations. 

Strategic thinking and problem solving

You will apply your MBA learnings to real-world challenges, putting into practice what you’ve learnt to find realistic long-term solutions. 

Adaptability

You will develop the adaptability to navigate future career challenges by responding to unfamiliar markets, changing priorities and new ways of working.

A global mindset

Exposure to different economies, politics and cultural contexts will help you understand how business decisions can vary across international markets.

Stakeholder engagement

You will build the confidence to understand different perspectives and how to interact with organisations, entrepreneurs and leaders from around the world. 

Do I have to pay extra for the Global Experience Week?

As Global Experience Week is a compulsory module on the Full-Time MBA and Weekend MBA, the cost of the module fee, flights (to a cap), and visas are included in your tuition fees.

For Executive MBA and Global Online MBA students, this is an optional trip and would need to be funded separately from tuition fees.

Kenya: How can business address inequality?

The Global Experience Week offers a deep dive into the sustainability, social and investment factors that contribute to inequality in emerging markets. With a particular focus on how these forces interact and influence development, students will gain a critical understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing rapidly growing economies.

Ideal for students with an interest in sustainability, social impact or emerging markets, this module equips participants with the tools to analyse complex systems and propose responsible, impactful solutions.

While locations may vary, previous cohorts have travelled to Nairobi, gaining first-hand insights into local dynamics and engaging directly with community stakeholders and innovators.

The Nordics: Exploring Novel Possibilities

This module immerses MBA students in the frontier of innovation, exploring how complex ideas evolve into tangible businesses. Through company visits and guest speakers, students gain practical insights on the factors impacting success. They are exposed to ideas, inventions and business models that initially seemed unrealistic but eventually became viable products, services or businesses.  

Students with an interest in entrepreneurship, sustainability or building non-profits will thrive on this module, returning with the expertise to build pioneering organisations. 

Cohorts travel around the Nordics, most recently Helsinki and Copenhagen, to learn from innovative organisations and industry leaders in sustainability-focused business ecosystems.

Chile: Tackling Wicked Problems

Some of the world’s biggest business and societal challenges don’t have a single right answer. Known as wicked problems, these complex business issues have no clear solution, and every decision creates new variables and challenges.

During the Chile Global Experience Week, students work with a local organisation, drawing on the concepts and frameworks explored throughout the MBA, and in particular from the Wicked Problems, Systems Dynamics, and Entrepreneurial Innovation module, to come up with a solution to the challenge that they are facing. 

It is a dynamic week that allows students to deep dive into local market dynamics and build solutions that work in the context of real communities, cultures and local organisations.

This experience is particularly suited to students interested in innovation, entrepreneurship, strategy, consulting and sustainability, who want to develop their ability to solve complex challenges in dynamic international business environments.

"Spending time with the fishing communities changed how we approached the problem. What looked like a viable financial model did not always align with the realities of the community’s values, identities and sense of stewardship that drove their conservation efforts. I would have got the structural answer right from my lectures in London. I would not have got the design principle right without being in Chile."

Naman Goyal
Full-Time MBA