Objectives and target audience

This handbook gives a design-focused and theory-based methodology for business problem-solving projects, be they large or small, driven by one or a group of business students in consulting roles. Our methodology has been developed for university business programmes such as MBA programmes, for which the development of student competences to solve real-life business problems is a key objective. Or, in other words, for business courses that aim to educate professionals. The core competence of the scientist is research, but for professionals such as doctors, lawyers and engineers, it is problem-solving in the field. For the business student the development of that competence can be supported by in-house courses on problem-solving methodology and courses based around written case-studies, but in our opinion its key component should be business problem-solving (BPS) in a real-life context. This can be achieved either by a trainee within a company taking on a BPS project of six months or so, or as a smaller project undertaken by a group of students visiting a company on a few occasions to do their analysis and present their proposals.

This handbook can be used in a general classroom course to prepare for business problem-solving fieldwork, and subsequently as a sourcebook for preparing and running actual field projects. It can also be used as additional reading (possibly with one or more classroom training sessions) for a disciplinary course aiming to combine theory with the application of that theory in practice.