The business economics pyramid at Corvinus – case solving at university
In the beginning – around the time you have your 6th or 7th university class, when they give you the syllabus – the business economics pyramid at Corvinus seems like an incredibly well-structured problem. A four-semester-long course with a narrowing focus and with a continuous immersion in business case solving; at the end of which there is a possibility to attend an international competition. But the closer one gets to the top of the pyramid, the more the stable educational structure disappears, the more panic someone has while preparing and the more surprised he gets regarding what and how much he has learned. As a naïve freshman, looking at the flyer introducing the “bus-eco pyramid”, I also committed to the goal that I needed to compete in CIBS in two years.
The bus-eco pyramid essentially gives a nice frame to the Bachelor education in business, starting from the basics: the business economics. In the first semester this is a “decent” course alternating between team work and frontal education where we received the basics and the mentality of business, while reality occasionally showed up between theoretical frameworks in the form of a case study or an interview.
The second semester course, corporate strategy, has a transition role to the later case solving courses, the basics learned in business economics are elaborated through case studies, topic by topic. In our case, this course was still relatively far from implementation, it had more of an analytical function where we could practice presenting and opposing.
After skipping a semester we had the chance to go forward to the more challenging – moreover English language – courses. The third step was Cases on Business Economics, the first course that really focused on case studies where we were working on cases in four-member teams and then presented them every two weeks. The weeks in between were spent by theoretical lectures and feedback in order to ensure a continuous development throughout the semester.
By the 5th semester we finally reached the top of the pyramid: the Cases on International Business Strategies. This is the course that you cannot simply take, you need to get in: you have apply by solving a sample case in a four-member team and based on the submitted solutions they select the five teams that can participate in the course. Then starts the difficult part: you need to solve a business case every two weeks and then present it in front of a jury, survive the Q&A by defending your solution and finally listen to the feedback on your performance. It best compares to a training camp where the hard work is not enough and you will receive the critiques for your own good so the next time you will be more prepared and more confident in front of the jury. In the meantime of course your analytical skills continuously improve, you learn to prepare a more credible financial background for your solution, you present better and your brain gets full with diverse – often strange – industry-specific information. The finale of the course is the final case – for us it was the pharmaceutical company Merck – where we got to compete with the opposing teams in our best shape, in front of an extended jury who, according to their previous promise, had saved their meanest questions for the last case. The best summary of CIBS is perhaps by a friend of mine: “you realize it afterwards that even though they did not “teach” you anything, this is the course that taught you the most in university.”
Zsófia Farsang (member of the 2013 CIBS winning team)