International Live Case «Your Gateway to China»

35 bachelor students from the Bern University of Applied Sciences Business School and 58 students from the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague successfully worked together on a live-case provided by SwissPost: Their initiative «Your Gateway to China» supports SME’s in their e-commerce expansion to the Chinese Market by offering a comprehensive full-service cross-border e-commerce solution. 

Over a period of more than four months the student groups conducted a global strategic analysis of the Swiss and EU industry markets as well as the Chinese end-consumer market. Furthermore, they assessed the market potential for SwissPost’s «Your Gateway to China»-program with recommendations which would be expanded on in a follow on study-block early January.  

After an intensive week of virtual collaboration, each group presented their final analysis with recommended strategic measures to the representatives of SwissPost in January 2021. The representatives were deeply impressed with the findings, innovative ideas and creative recommendations and have started to assess and implement the most relevant approaches right away. The students enjoyed working on this interesting yet challenging project a lot and saw it as a valuable learning experience. As one student pointed out: «It was a great experience for me and I'm very glad to have been a part of it. I want to thank all my colleagues for the great collaboration on this work.»

The lecturers of this course, Marie Brechbühler Peskova and Jacqueline Bürki, were also very happy with the outcomes of this course and collaboration: «Our bachelor students did a great job on this challenging but very interesting live-case with «Your Gateway to China». It was a great pleasure to coach and support all student teams and seeing their progress even in this all-virtual environment», said  Marie Brechbühler Peskova. Jaqueline Bürki added: «This course is an exemplary approach to applied learning. It was extremely rewarding to work with our student teams and go through the iterative process of finding out even better solutions from different perspectives.»