- Approx. 200 second semester Marketing Management students from Cphbusiness Søerne took part (both Danish and English classes)
- Approx. 20+ third year Finance students from the Finnish Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences took part: http://www.metropolia.fi/en/
- 80 Finance students from the Dutch Hogeschool Utrecht took part: http://www.international.hu.nl/
- For 6 weeks during September and October 2014 all the students worked at their respective universities and communicated online via Skype and Facebook.
- During week 43 the final was held in Helsinki where 6 national winning teams, 2 teams from each county took part.
- The 6 teams presented their projects and were all declared winners.
Project Consolidation
200 students from Cphbusiness took part in a big, international project and learned how big companies do mergers.
11 November 2014
In the fall of 2014, 200 second semester Marketing Management students from both Danish and English classes at Cphbusiness Søerne took part in a big, international and interactive finance project with over 300 students participating from Holland, Finland and Denmark.
Project Consolidation took up the topic of mergers. The setup for the project was an interactive, interdisciplinary and compact collaboration, where the students focused on a new subject each week and collaborated across national borders.
- This project has given the students a chance to learn their curriculum through a relevant case and given them hands-on experience with international collaboration. Moreover, the project included representatives from companies, a workshop run by a professor from a Dutch university, opportunities for close sparing with lecturers and weekly assignments. We hope the students came out of the project with an increased awareness of what to be aware of, when doing international collaborations, says lecturer Karen Rasmussen.
The Danish students who worked in groups were paired with groups of students from other countries to work on fictive mergers between real companies:
- SAS (Denmark) / Finnair (Finland)
- Royal Unibrew (Denmark) / Heineken (Holland)
- De Telegraaf (Holland) / Sanoma Media (Finland)
The goal was to negotiate a merger between the companies.
The project had four focus areas:
- Internationalisation
- Consolidation
- Cooperation
- Competition
Development and challenges
The students have enjoyed being a part of the project even though it was challenging.
- It’s great to work with a project like this. It is very realistic and totally different from reading a book, says Emil Alexander Vang Bødtker.
- We use about 14-16 hours a week on this project on top of our classes and studies, so it is hard work, but challenging and fun, says Xenia Andersen.
- This is the first time we have done a project of this type and we can see that it is more hands on and dynamic that class room based work. Working with real companies who come to meet the students brings a lot of value to the project. It adds an extra dimension. The international aspect in collaborating with universities in Holland and Finland is both new and exciting, says lecturer Michael Vodder.
FACTS