By Francesca Concina BMBA ’17

Thirty professionals from 20 countries, flying abroad after eight weeks of studying together. This is the Bentley MBA class of 2017 that kicked off on July 18 and went to Paris eight weeks later for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to innovate, to be inspired, and to learn from faculty, top professionals, and classmates. We took what we learned on campus and applied it 3,438 miles away, in Paris.

Bentley professors Andy Aylesworth and Gesa Kirsch stimulated our creativity. They challenged this group of people coming from different backgrounds — including finance, science, marketing, and law — to think differently, to converge and diverge our thoughts, to find new solutions, to go beyond the obvious. They put us in groups of five and, following the process of the d.school, the Institute of Design at Stanford, we developed disruptive projects.

Then we met Nicolas Minvielle, professor at the Audencia Business School in France and well-known professional who worked for Philippe Stark, and found innovation consultancies with top clients from a variety of sectors, including banking, retail and travel. He opened our minds again when he presented our challenge: Innovate a product for a world leader in the kitchen appliance sector and introduce it to the company’s U.S. and French teams while in Paris.

WHERE CULTURE MEETS CREATIVITY

This trip was a mix of learning, business and inspiration. During the morning, we studied at the Schoolab, an innovation center in Paris. In the afternoon, we met designers at the Paris Design Week, startups and consultancies in the design and innovation field, and then we discussed social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility. Following class, we found inspiration in the painting of Monet and Van Gogh at the Musée d’Orsay, in the view from the Eiffel Tower, and walking through the Tuileries Garden or down the Champs-Élysées. This compelling mix of design, culture and innovation — not to mention the delicious food — sparked our creativity.

After long nights working on our projects, building temporary offices at the hotel’s lobby or at the first cafeteria on our way, finally, we went to Usine IO, a lab where we prototyped our products. The atmosphere was exciting as a team of engineers worked with us and helped us in giving birth to our thoughts. Innovation is more than thinking. It’s a state of mind that can change the way you live your life and your work, and revamp your business. It's something you have to accept, to incubate and to try.

We learned to be brave: How to take risks, how to step up and step back while working in teams, how to improve a project building on others’ ideas and how to look at issues from different perspectives. 

During the past week, our group, linked by the passion of learning, discovered the beauty of facing ambiguity and challenges, and of being able to react creatively. During the past week, our group proved to a worldwide company the priceless value generated by diversity.

We felt at the “top of the world,” and we will continue to “build, make, iterate” to further develop our career throughout the Bentley MBA program. Next trip? Athens!