A good internship is something that leads to sleepless nights of many B-schoolers. After going through that phase, I got an opportunity to work with one of the top 100 companies of Fortune 500 companies – Bosch. Coincidentally, I have always wanted to work with the company since my engineering days and when I finally got the opportunity, my joy knew no bounds.
So, the journey began with a competition, where Bosch had conducted a "Business Idea Competition" at our esteemed campus, we had registered in teams of four, and yes, all four of us were the closest of friends. Maybe that was an add-on to the idea we presented before the panel of judges. The chemistry was just so amazing that each of us knew which portion should be assigned to whom. Everybody excelled during the presentation and we were finally IN for the internship.
Details of the Bosch Challenge:
IERO is an intrapreneurial venture in Bosch which caters to IOT Personalization technologies. IERO came up with the challenge for B-school students. The problem statement was to build a platform strategy for personalizing tech for retail (with focus on B2B businesses). We had to participate in teams of 2-4 and I paired up with three of my closest friends in college.
The 1 week of time that we got before final presentation was a whole new experience. Coming up with a business case which is relevant to IERO and designing a business model required us to put all our MBA learnings together. The best part of the challenge was that it was not any specialization specific. Starting from doing field work (interviewing people in SPAR hypermarket where IERO has already implemented its solutions as well as designing questionnaire to interview at different retail outlet) to analysing the existing problem in the market, coming up with new technological solutions, estimating the market size and finally estimating the cost of implementation covered the application of all that we had learnt in the first trimester and delve deeper.
We were very happy when our efforts were recognised and our team got selected for internship in Bosch.
The two months internship in IERO, Bosch gave me a completely new perspective of managing problems. I worked as a Business Development intern and my area of focus was personalization in UAE Hospitality Industry. The target was to understand the current global market scenario to gain insights on mobility domain and personalization trends, finding customer touchpoints across different sectors and finally to understand the position of IERO in the market by benchmarking its features against industry and through SWOT analysis and Business Model canvas. The entire project was done keeping in mind that main focus of the team is to create value by enriching user experiences.
During these two months I got a good exposure to the business side of the industry. Having a prior experience in working in the technical domain after completing engineering, helped in connecting with the developers who were implementing the proposed business solutions. On top of that, interacting directly with IERO clients to understand the real world problems and finally coming up with some solutions provided an overall enriched experience.
The internship would have been incomplete without the help of my company mentor Mr. Pavan Govindan, co-founder of IERO. His valuable guidance and continuous encouragement to give an insight about how business development works and how to go about the project has been immensely helpful. He not only helped me with my queries at every step of the project but also arranged the critical resources required for the successful completion of the project. In fact, the entire team helped in creating an environment of support and comfort which catalysed my learning process.
While we arrived the final week of our internship, we all had our final presentations, and it felt overwhelming when every person sitting at the panel appreciated my work. Mr. Pavan congratulated me, and simultaneously told me about a few challenges that I might have to face during corporate life. The internship ended well, but the excitement continues!
One major takeaway for me during this internship was to analyse a problem from a broader perspective and then deep dive into it. If given an opportunity, I would love to work again with Bosch in a Finance role.