september 2009.pdf - CBS OBSERVER

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3 6 i h a v e s o p a i d f o r t h i s What’s up CBS? Believe it or not but this is the last time that you will hear from me (sniffle). I know. I know… I will miss you too, but it’s time to start a new part of my life. The torture is over, and I’m alive to tell the tale. Strictly speaking I should be happy about that. But then, there’s the reality of being jobless and returning to my parents’ house in South Africa. Hey, it will be cool to live rent free for a while, but I am not sure how long that will last. The parents are pretty easy going people, but at the end of the day I am a child to them, no matter how old I get. And a very proficient testimony to just how long childhood lasts is Dude´s 90-year-old great grandmother, who used to tell his 70-year-old grandmother to wear a jumper every time she left the house to go somewhere. The great grandmother also used to check on her daughter’s diet too. So clearly, as long as your parents are still alive, they will fuss over you no matter how old you both get. It’s comfort- b y k u t l o a n o " t h u l i " s k o s a n a ing. It’s also very, very scary in a hilarious way. I have grown fond of this charming city called Copenhagen, so I am a little sad to be leaving. Oh yes, I lost my cycling virginity! I had an accident and fell off my bike, so I consider myself a baptised (baptism-by-asphalt) Copenhagener! The dude also doesn’t look so nervous anymore when we cycle together. I’ve probably fallen more in love with Copenhagen because I finally got the chance to be a tourist these last few weeks. I no longer face the possibility of shaming myself by leaving without seeing the Little Mermaid or seeing the city by boat, or visiting landmarks like the Black Diamond or hanging out in one of the famous bars on Nørrebro. Speaking of the Black Diamond, we had our graduation dinner at the Søren K restaurant in the building. I can’t say that it was the most earth shatteringly orgasmic meal I’ve ever had, but then again Copenhagen is a i n - h o u s e n e w s p a p e r f o r co p e n h a g e n b u s i n e s s s c h o o l nightmare for a vegetarian/pescetarian. But that’s a conversation for another time. Nevertheless, the venue made for the prettiest sunset photos, and we danced until we were kicked out at some ungodly hour. When the DJ started playing the Dirty Dancing soundtrack theme song, the manager must have thought it was time to shut the place down. Yeah, a bit cheesy but we did (or at least I did) have the time of our life in this town, so the tune was appropriate. Earlier on that day, we had all donned our Harry Potter outfits at Porcelænshaven, marched to the sound of a harp for the grand entrance, listened to some entertaining speeches and then received our graduation certificates. Although I’ve participated in graduations before this one, there was something different this time around. It seems to have more meaning. Was it because of all the suffering we went through as MBA students? A friend of mine back home says it’s just a sign that I’m getting old. Rudeness – obviously not just a Danish trait! Anyway, we got to do the American thing and threw our hats in the air for the group photo and then immediately started our alcoholic binge – by all appearances we were celebrating, but in reality we were just postponing the eventuality of being face to face with unemployment. But if statistics are anything to go by, then 70 percent of us should be in a job within three months. So, as I’m packing to leave I realize that I will miss the MBA program. Yes, it is definitely a sign of sickness… as in sick in the head. Then again, the course has been my life for a year and there is definitely some emptiness now that it’s over. Even Miss Thang started feeling unwell at the end of the project, saying that she might have adrenalin withdrawal problems. Of course that was worth giggling about. That is definitely one part of my life here that I will miss immensely, giggling in the Metro, in class and every- Next January, CBS’ Full-time MBA-program will be ranked in the Financial Times for the first time. This autumn it will be ranked in the Wall Street Journal. Not that this is a cause for concern – things are going well for the program. In a time when Stockholm Business School and the Norwegian School of Management (BI) in Oslo are closing their full-time MBA-programs, CBS’ is turning out to be a marketplace survivor. Here the interest has grown rather than lessened. For this school year’s program, 2500 leads became 190 serious applicants with 45 to 50 students starting this September. where else with Miss Thang, but I’m sure we will have lots of virtual giggles until we see each other again. Hopefully the characters we come across are as entertaining as the train drunks and animal pelt wearing grannies (they call it mink) from Kongens Nytorv. Packing books and files has been a killer job… and also a realization of just how much material we (the forty classmates) have covered in just one year. It is a mixture between reassurance and insurance regarding the fact that there is no such thing as an insurmountable task. It’s also a rather heavy souvenir of all the intellectual challenges we have been put through. I will miss the hilarious professors who made us question our world views – like Teacher of the year Can Seng Ooi who did the International Business course, and Thomas Ritter (the kind advisor) who did the Marketing course. The others whom I enjoyed for their passion and expertise are Alan Hansen (Managerial Accounting), Toorben Juul Andersen (Managerial Decision Making and Strategic Management) and John Hayes (Change Management). The administration team... what a bunch of cool people. Somehow I know that leaving is not a permanent goodbye to them. And my classmates? I have found some lifelong friends, and that is one of the things that have made this experience even more worth it. Something that is even sicker is that I find myself actually envying the new class. The MBA year is the one year where anything goes. You get to try it all, make mistakes, challenge yourself and others, learn new things and, and, and, and… I wouldn’t do it again… Oh no! No-no! I have so paid for this! But I would not not have done it for the world. All in all, CBS and Copenhagen have been fantastic. I got a degree and a dude … a trenchant for professional masochism and much, much more. So how to terminate? I’ll be back? Vi Ses! 1 CBS – a full-time MBA marketplace survivor The diversity of the program continues with students, about 30 percent of them female, coming from places like Argentina, Brazil and Colombia over Zambia and Bhutan to Europe, with Scandinavians, Baltic and Germans making up about half the program. About 95 percent of them are paying their own way. With its entrepreneurship, Scandinavian leadership and real world challenge-focus, supplemented with an elective specifically addressing the global financial crisis, CBS’ Full-time MBA 2009-2010 also boasts the highest GMAT-average for many years. 1
c b s o b s e r v e r 6 s e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 9 3 7 The Business of Quantum Physics CBS’ Full-time MBA Program seeks to be and is diverse. The 40 students in the recently matriculated class of 2008-9 stemmed from 22 countries on five continents and boasted an impressive 35 percent female students. The student profiles were equally diverse, spanning from corporate executives to an army officer, a computer game developer and… a quantum physicist? p r o f i l e d e v e l o p m e n t By Bjørn Hyldkrog Photo: Rie Neuchs Davide Ricci, a 33 year old, Milanese quantum physicist, has just spent an exhausting year and a small fortune on CBS’ Full-time MBA program. He has spent seven years acquiring the fluent mathematics of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger. Now he also speaks Peter Drucker, Milton Friedman, Michael Porter and Alfred D. Chandler – with a 12 in his final exam to prove that he speaks it well. Quantum physics – or quantum mechanics – focuses on physical reality at the subatomic level of matter (molecules and atoms) and the subatomic (electrons, protons and even smaller particles). Insight into what it takes for matter and radiation to make up their mind whether to be a wave (energy) or a particle (matter) is crucial for our understanding of the physical universe. But it is a long step from the principles ruling the realities of the subatomic world to the principles ruling the realities of business world. Davide Ricci, however, is an entrepreneur. He’s got a product, a business plan and a business partner presently in the process of vacating offices at Symbion, the largest science park in Denmark. He’s up against the global financial crunch, looking for investors and getting set to use everything that he’s spent about 350.000 DKR learning at CBS in order to make a go of it. - It took me about six months to get into the mind set – it was a bit like going from UNIX to DOS. Through the year my company has reaped great benefits from my having used it as case, directly applying the knowledge I acquired with the MBA to it. Now we have a strategy, a marketing plan and several ideas to further develop the business, Davide reflects. Pendulum Vitae After graduating from the University of Milano Bicocca with a MSC in Materials Science (Solid State Physics) in 2000, Davide Ricci spent three more years there doing a Ph.D, specializing in quantum physics applied to molecules and materials. He then took a long, hard look at his prospects for getting to work in the academic field that he had spent the last seven years of his life on and decided he’d better get a job and make some money instead. As a sideline to his Ph.D. Davide had co-founded and worked in an open source software consultancy for small retail companies. Based on his competencies from that, Davides next career step was It took Davide Ricci six months of Full-time MBA to change his mind set, but now he has mutated into a rare breed; a quantum physicist with a business plan. going to work for local Milanese IT-consultant company, Chelidon Consulting, which specialized in software development for business applications. Fifteen months later he’d been worked to the bone: - It was too much work, working with something that wasn’t my primary interest. So I decided to quit and get back into doing research. When I finished my Ph.D. I had mainly focused on Milano and Italy, but this time I applied to Princeton University, California Institute of Technology and Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States. I was very quickly offered a position at Georgia Tech, working under Professor Uzi Landam at the School of Physics, Davide explains. The next two years were spent doing cutting edge quantum physics, working at calculating new catalytic processes in clean energy technology for the US Department of Technology. The simulated properties had not been seen before, the work was noticed and the results were published in A-journals in the field. Davide also helped working on new software for calculating DNA-properties, which was his initiation into working on small molecules. Getting down to business So how did this lead to Copenhagen and CBS? Well, as a result of the attention, Davide Ricci was contacted by Atomistix , a Danish spin-off company from the Niels Bohr Institute. Here he was offered the opportunity to work with practical applications of the theoretical work he had done at Georgia Tech. - I moved to Copenhagen and became a scientific applications specialist, doing consultancy work and contract research. I discovered that I really enjoyed working with my specialty from a business oriented approach, Davide says. For the next year and a half, Davide developed software for calculating the properties of molecules and solids for major European and American companies in the automotive, pharmaceutical and microelectronics fields. Unfortunately, Atomistix went bankrupt in September 2008, and while the previous owners bought the software from the bankruptcy and revived the firm in a leaner and smaller incarnation under the name Quantumwise, Davide Ricci was already in the process of moving on. First stop – CBS. - I had already decided to apply to get into CBS’ Full-time MBA program sometime around Christmas / New Year. Working for Atomistix, doing more business oriented activities had been fun. But in trying to move further in that direction I discovered, that I didn’t have the right tools and mindset – I was too specialized, Davide explains. Davide Ricci wanted those tools and competencies enough to take a year with no income and pay just under 250.000 DKR to take an MBA, something that has turned out to be his life savings and more. Plug&Play R&D While working for Atomistix, Davides boss was Thomas Holm Rod, Ph.D. in Computational Physics from DTU, the Technical University of Denmark, and Post Doc researcher at the Department of Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute in California. Thomas Rod had spent about seven years doing research and working with molecule simulations and calculations, mainly in the pharmaceutical field. - Up to the time of the bankruptcy, Thomas and I discussed a business concept. So while I started up at CBS, he set up shop with hBar Solutions Aps in Symbion, where I joined him as a partner in February. hBar Solutions’ business concept is to drastically bring down the cost of research and development of small molecule products, especially in the chemical and pharmaceutical areas – from paints to new drugs. The product is a plug-and-play web-application and online access to supercomputers, where the customers only pay for the use and access. - Basically, the customer defines the needed molecular property, and the hBar software automatically sets up the parameters and correct algorithms, giving a limited selection of molecules with the right properties. The customer then has a limited number of alternatives to be developed and tested in the lab. We offer to simultaneously speed up development time and limit R&Dinvestments considerably, Davide explains. Taking a new medicine as example, the drastically shorter and cheaper development period would give it a quicker path from concept to product. Society would benefit from the new medicine faster, and the company would benefit from its patents for longer. Win-win-win… but: - The financial crunch has made investors very few, very far between and extremely reluctant to part with their money. In Denmark there are presently only three active Venture Capital funds out of in all 45-50, so we haven’t been able to attract investors. Our application works, so until the end of the year – or until I find employment, I’ll be using all my newly acquired skills to prove the concept’s value and the company’s ability to earn money in practice, says Davide Ricci. 1 hBar Solutions Aps Website: www.hbarsol.com Application: www.hbar-lab.com.
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