On March 30, the MIT Sloan students of “China-lab”return back to the USA, the on-site investigation period of “China-lab”came to an end.

During the past one week, 6 MIT MBA students and 8 Tsinghua IMBA students were working together, interviewing the managers and employees, and making investigation into Chinese innovation companies. At the weekend, the students also played a visit to the famous place, like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and Tian An Men Square to know the local life and Chinese culture.

From March 12 to 18, Chinese MBA students has visited MIT for one week. Besides taking the lecture given to “China lab” students, they also selected classes on entrepreneur or innovation, which is part of Sloan Innovation Week. Tsinghua students also have communication with students from domestic business school, like FuDan, LingNan and KunMing. They are all collaborative partners with MIT Sloan and participants of “China lab” program.

In the last day staying in Boston, Chinese students visited the famous venture capital company IDG, the biggest bio-tech company Genzyme and the IBM consultant company.

Feedback from MBA students

Carlos, MIT students born in Spain, said the Chinese company opened its door and welcomed the students. For the whole week he met with different people, different departments, and also met with CEO and CFO, which greatly beyond his expectation.

Being to Asia for the first time, Ryan said “China-lab”benefites a lot for the American business students to learn about how business operates in China, which is exactly the unique value of this program.

After working in Singapore for 5 years, Chunyu Li joined MIT Sloan. He said, though he can return back to China to visit some international companies during his work, this is still the first time that he got the chance to closely contact the entrepreneur company, to closely contact with the entrepreneurs and founders. He felt the Chinese companies improved a lot in the past several years, like the management system, the production efficiency and the human resource, however there are still a lot differences between eastern and western companies, such as the understanding to the rapid growth, and the vision of entrepreneurs.

Jingming Zhang, who graduated from Tsinghua ten years ago, came back to Tsinghua this time as the team leader of MIT students. He thought it is a good starting point for the students of MIT and Tsinghua, and next year the collaboration of both sides will get better and better. Jingming Zhang said, from his perspective, the program gave him a chance to make a deep understand to the Chinese company, as well as a communication chance to know the opinions of Chinese about the rapid development happened in China.

Elijah, Tsinghua international MBA students, said “China-lab”was a good culture exchange program. In his opinion, there are a lot of common points between MIT and Tsinghua, like both are famous for technical background and the collaboration between MIT Sloan and Tsinghua SEM has more than 10 years, they have the same textbooks, there in fact is much room for further collaboration.

Being an Canadian studying at Tsinghua international MBA program, Eric Liao said “China-lab”provides a chance to view one thing from different perspective. In the past week, Eric worked with another three students with different nationality in ChineseAll, a famous digital publishing company.

Robert Yu, a foreign student studying at Tsinghua international MBA program, said “China-lab”is one of his most valuable experiences of his MBA program. He made a lot of good friends through this program, as well as developed a more clear understanding to the operation of Chinese business.

Feedback from the partner company

Ray Tong, the CEO of ChineseALL, who graduated from Tsinghua MBA program, said “China-lab”was a very good program, for being an MAB student, learning knowledge is far from enough. To experience and even involved with the operation of business is the most important thing. Only by doing so, can students learn the real situation of China and the reality of business.

ChineseAll, UNISITS Technology Co. Ltd. And Optimization Petroleum Technologies, Inc. are the three companies worked as partners of“China-lab”program this year. They are all start-up and innovation company, which are also the criteria when selecting the partner company.

Feedback from instructor

Jonathan Lehrich, Manager of Special Projects and Lecturer of MIT Sloan School of Management, as the responsible MIT faculty of this program, said “ China lab” is an kind of example which allow one to apply what they have learnt in classroom to real life, to be a business professional even as student.

Jonathan has visited all the three companies in the week. He said by doing investigation to these successful and young companies, students could learn that how a company grew, which new market should enter, how to expand product. It should not easy to solve these problems, however they are perfect questions as mini-consult project. “China-lab”is a focused, targeted project for team of highly qualified business students.

Jonathan said, the project would continue for several weeks afterwards, “It will be a virtual team. It is one of the important lessons we are expecting of students how to be a successful professional, how to be successful entrepreneur and how to be successful consultant.”