Project Solutions Center is

At our faculty, the deans and professors are used to honestly asking themselves whether they are satisfied with the education they provide to their students. About seven years ago, we decided that we (and the entire higher education system) lacked a practical component: students were not involved in practical mastery of their profession – they studied management, but sitting at their desks, they did not know anything about real business.

And we, the professors, ourselves delved into the technologies, tools, and methods that appeared in the world's leading companies and became the hallmark of Industry 4.0.

At first, we ourselves figured out what Big Data, Blockchain, Process Mining, Python, Power BI were, and then immediately started teaching our students. Thus, we mastered what could already be taken to companies to take on current tasks and complete them with new tools (which, by the way, many company employees had not yet studied in their education). So, we went to companies not with the words «teach us», but with a desire to do better.

No one knew us and did not intend to meet us with open arms. In one month, we visited several companies: Unilever, PepsiCo, BMW, Bosch, Sberbank, De’Longhi, Coca-Cola, Pfizer – and offered to give us (as a trial) anything «beyond our capabilities».

It worked. We did some easy projects for several companies. Our marketing research and predictive models were liked by everyone. We moved on to business analytics. We signed nondisclosure agreements.

Here came the first serious success: we did a difficult project on analyzing business processes through Process Mining for the De’Longhi Group – CEO M.L. Pokrovsky called the results «very valuable», we signed an official cooperation agreement, and since then, we have been doing several projects per year.

Our relationships with Pfizer, BMW, Bosch, L’Oreal developed in a similar way. But with each new project, their interest in us grew, and the number of projects grew from two to 80 or more in 2022.

Even more. We get two big benefits. First: it's an opportunity to finally learn and study not through cases (with a known answer in advance), but on real tasks that companies are working on right now, and global companies at that.

In 3-4 projects, you can experience what it's like to be a finance specialist, a marketer, a creator of advertising content, a PR specialist, or an HR specialist. Such challenges really push people professionally and personally. And a successful project is a great personal achievement.

The second benefit is that a student takes on a project from the company where they plan to do a paid internship or possibly even work, so a project is a real chance to get a job in a desired company. As a result, project work for FESN students is not only a large part of the educational program, but also a «locomotive» for self-development and a way to find employment.

We brought them in. About 7 years ago, deans of Spanish, French, and Italian universities told us that they had nowhere to take projects from and they didn't know how to do them—they were learning in the old-fashioned way, through cases. But we ourselves gave them projects, and they started to get involved, and then became so enthusiastic that they included our projects in their educational programs, and the French even involved their branch in Brazil.

In the latest project from Pfizer, there was one team each from Belgium, Germany, Italy, two from us, four from France, and five from Brazil. Traditionally, in their third year, our students undertake a serious business project in English with a foreign university. And during this six-month work, they go there for preliminary or final presentation. We hope for continuation, but we want to add a «Russian component» to this.

Definitely—we have tripled the number of orders from large and medium-sized Russian enterprises this spring. We focus on real project work on assignments offered by companies in Russian regions. We take these assignments from structures under regional governments (like the Innovation Agency under the Government of Moscow), and we do them ourselves or in cooperation with local universities.

In the near future, we plan to start project cooperation with universities in Nizhny Novgorod, Tomsk, Yekaterinburg, Tula, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Lipetsk, Kaliningrad, and Novosibirsk. The students have already been to Nizhny Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Kazan, Tomsk, Tver, Khabarovsk, Sarapul, Bolkhov and not as tourists, but on business trips.