MBA in Russia to Earn Money
Christian Graggaber always knew that he wanted to open a business in Russia. So he left his job at an international forestry company in South Africa for an MBA program at Moscow’s Skolkovo Business School.
Two years ago, he changed his career in the forestry industry to the fashion industry and, using the school program and his contacts, founded his own company.
It was dedicated to the revolutionary method of teaching the MBA, which was based on practical exercises. I studied business administration in Italy 10 years ago, so I didn’t want to repeat the theoretical course I had already taken,” Graggaber says.
The Moscow School of Management Skolkovo offers an MBA program that focuses on new markets and practical aspects of business, with less emphasis on theory. The main emphasis in training is on new projects in the field of high technologies and consumer goods.
In abroad, many MBA programs put theory as a priority, allocate a lot of time to analyze the best cases of world practice. Here are just the real mechanisms of work in new markets such as Brazil, India and China? not covered in textbooks. The omnipresent bureaucracy, corruption and constant problems with logistics are the hallmarks of the markets of the BRIC countries. Therefore, managers who work here must be aware of all the realities of doing business in these countries.
The popularity of business schools has increased since the fall of the communist regime. It was then that there was a need to form a new approach to management. Now there are about 150 schools that offer MBA programs. Most of the programs are speaking, but there are also several accredited by international agencies. The Skolkovo program is one of the most famous. In turn, the Graduate School of Management at St. Petersburg State University offers worthy master’s programs in management and management MBAs.
Skolkovo_MBA
The Skolkovo MBA program combines management theory with consulting projects throughout (more often in the provinces), and includes a two-month strategic consulting project in India or China.
It gives students the opportunity to gain much more practical experience in new markets, which is not available in most MBAs,” says Valeria Pavlyukovskaya, Director of the Skolkovo Management MBA Program. This program also involves the development of students of their own business.
This year, the school has 45 full-time students and 200 more students on the EMBA. Both programs focus on the development of entrepreneurial abilities and the acquisition of practical experience by students. This is what attracted the attention of the Austrian Graggaber.
He is the executive director and founder of the company Juvalia & You , an online jewelry store that operates on the principle of network marketing. He employs sales representatives (the company calls them “stylists”) who sell jewelry in the same way that Avon or Mary Kay sell cosmetics.
The company appeared simultaneously in the markets of four countries , Germany, India and Brazil, after it discovered that in these markets there was an empty niche for costume jewelry that had already been filled in the United States. The company focuses mainly on the population of regions remote from Moscow and St. Petersburg, whose purchasing power is much lower than in the capital.
Graggaber credits Skolkovo’s MBA program as a key factor in his success. Thanks to her, he was able to find business partners in and understand the peculiarities of the market.
Through the school, Graggaber met the CEO of the fashion trading giant KupiVIP , who later co-founded his jewelry company. He helped to find financing and everything necessary to start a business project.
A lot of time takes the legal registration of the enterprise and the establishment of logistics.
Skolkovo faculty , many of whom moved from Insead and MIT or are from the class of oligarchs and top businessmen, were the main reason why Ruslan Mukhametzyanov, chief executive of the Moscow United Electric Grid Company, chose this particular school.
Mukhametzyanov founded an electricity supply company with his classmates as part of an EMBA graduation project. Half of the group then worked in the energy sector, and two were bankers.
“Our idea was to create small independent power plants that could solve the problem of consumer access to electrical and heating systems,” says Mukhatetzyanov.
Consumers can wait for months to connect to power plants in areas that for some reason are not served by the existing network. This problem greatly slows down business development. Skolkovo President Andrey Rappoport, who until 2009 was the executive director of the Federal Grid Company, and in the nineties was a member of the Alfa Bank’s chairmanship board, advised students to slightly reformat their business plan.
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“We changed our idea quite a lot after Andrey Rappoport’s advice,” says Mukhametzyanov.
However, not all MBA programs emphasize learning practical know-how in order to overcome the complexities of the market. The Academy of Foreign Trade (VAVT), which was founded in 1930 to train Soviet trade representatives, now offers MBA programs focused on the study of management theory.
“Our students have not studied business before, so we try to pay more attention to student master’s theses,” says Olga Andreeva, dean of the Faculty of Professional Programs.
The school has ties with the Ministry of Economic Development of and develops programs for its employees, who make up about 30% of the MBA students of VAVT. At the same time, several civil servants teach at the school. Among them is Viktor Melnikov, a member of the Chairman’s Council of the Central Bank . “Now in our society there is a rather critical attitude towards government workers, but I hope that our program will help students working in the private sector to establish useful contacts,” says Andreeva. She also notes that, through joint learning, private entrepreneurs and bureaucrats have the opportunity to learn a lot from each other.