How emlyon’s International MBA helps students turn ideas into ventures
One of the most valuable opportunities business schools provide is the ability to merge theoretical knowledge with practical application.
This is an integral part of emlyon business school and its International MBA (IMBA) program, which prioritizes building students’ real-world business sense through unique immersive learning experiences.
This is never truer than during the New Ventures Project. Over the project’s three-month run, using startup and innovation methodologies, students identify a real-world problem, conduct market research, establish business models, find clients, and launch products or services.
Learning to start with the problem
The course is taught by Benjamin-Samuel Ewenczyk, an entrepreneur and innovation specialist with experience spanning startups, product development, and corporate entrepreneurship. This includes a vintage clothing brand that he created with a past student.
Drawing from this experience, Benjamin encourages innovation to start from exploration.
“The first part of the course is really to ask: what is the problem you want to solve, and who are the people that have it?” he explains.
Rather than beginning with a polished idea, students first work in what Benjamin calls the problem space, which involves defining a specific challenge and validating whether it genuinely affects the people they want to serve.
“The point is not to jump straight into the solution space,” he says. “Anything is a hypothesis until you’ve proven it.”
Throughout the semester, students apply the lean startup loop of build, measure, and learn. Benjamin emphasizes that throughout the course they continue to test their assumptions through interviews, feedback, and experimentation. By the end of the course, they present a minimum viable product (MVP) to a panel.
“The New Ventures Project takes a problem through the lean startup process to create a minimum viable product,” says Erica, a current IMBA participant. “By the end of the semester, we present that MVP to a panel of investors, incubators, or judges.”
Turning challenges into practical solutions
For Mun Ting, another current IMBA student, the New Ventures Project focused on a challenge many international families in Lyon face: navigating the French childcare system.
“Our project focused on helping international parents navigate the complex childcare system in Lyon,” she says. “We developed the idea for a website and mobile app that could explain the process, options, and paperwork in under five minutes something that usually takes hours to figure out.”
Conducting interviews with potential users was one of the most challenging parts of the experience.
“Interviewing parents was difficult because my network in Lyon was still small and many people spoke French, which I’m still learning,” she says.
Yet the process became a key learning opportunity. Instead of simply discussing entrepreneurship in theory, students were asked to test ideas in real-world conditions.
“The project allowed us to apply the theories we learned in class in a very practical way,” Mun Ting says. “At the same time, working in a group helped us see each other’s strengths.”
Building resilience through teamwork
For Erica, the biggest challenge of the project was internal. Having previously started a business with her husband, she was already familiar with entrepreneurship. However, building a venture with a newly formed multicultural team required a new approach.
“I’ve started my own company before, but it was with my husband, someone I know very well,” she says. “Building a company with people you’ve just met, who all work differently, was definitely a challenge.”
However, learning to work through those differences helped develop her communication and collaboration skills, an advantage many students gain during business school.
“It taught us that it’s okay to fail and that iteration is essential,” Erica says. “If you think about the solution before really understanding the problem, you end up with a less impactful project.”
Benjamin says learning from unsuccessful experiments is an important part of the process.
“If an experiment doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean the work was wasted,” he says. “As long as you learn something from it, you come out stronger.”
A reflection of the IMBA experience
While the New Ventures Project focuses on entrepreneurship, its lessons extend beyond startup creation. The methodologies students learn can also help within larger organisations. Whether it’s identifying innovation opportunities or making strategic decisions, a creative and forward-thinking mindset can benefit professionals in any role.
For Erica, the project captures the broader spirit of the International MBA.
“It’s a project that really sums up what the IMBA is about learning and connecting with people from different cultures to solve a business problem,” she says.
For Mun Ting, the experience has already influenced her future ambitions.
“The project gave me the confidence to engage more with the startup ecosystem in Lyon,” she says.
By combining entrepreneurial frameworks with real-world problem solving, emlyon’s International MBA offers students the opportunity not just to study innovation, but to practice it.