Weekly Journal #4

Summary of Activities

After last week's video deliverable, the group agreed to take a break this week to focus on other academic activities. We met again over Skype on March 27th to discuss the results of our video and kick off the project's next phase. We have also begun to reach out to our contacts at Glaxo to see if any of them would be willing to grant us an interview and discuss GSK's corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Reflection

We again received very positive feedback from the tutors on our video deliverable, which was encouraging given the logistical problems we'd encountered in its production. The week off from the project has also helped us to refocus and gain some perspective on our next steps. Sometimes it is difficult to properly prioritize and organize a project when you're in the middle of a deliverable crunch. A little time to step back and reflect can be invaluable in determining priorities.

Next Steps

This week, team members will continue to reach out to GSK contacts both in Europe and North America, in order to determine what access we have to the company. Specifically, our NYU colleagues should be looking at making connections both in New York and a Glaxo's North American headquarters in Philadelphia. On the European side, the European team members will be working towards securing contacts both locally in Milan and Barcelona, and hopefully at Glaxo's global HQ in London.

Weekly Journal #3

Summary of Activities

This week, we decided how we were going to approach the video progress report, by sharing our thoughts and structuring the video content in our google doc, and we recorded individually the different parts of it. Then, we assembled all the parts together, and one of our team members, in view of its experience in video editing and its role as “Coordinator” for this deliverable, edited the video. Therefore, we successfully submitted our video progress report, and are now waiting to receive some feedback from the GIM coordinators.

Reflections

On one hand, this has been a positive experience since it allowed us to gather together once more, with the objective to create a video…remotely! Using this tool was also interesting since we got more familiar with the recording and editing processes. In addition to that, day after day, we get to know each other better, which lead us to adapt and find the best way to work together.

On the other hand, the video progress report also involved some challenges. Indeed, we had to use a new format for this deliverable, far from the traditional powerpoint presentations from our Business Schools. Another challenge was the editing process, which required time but we hope to have met the coordinator’s expectations. Finally, the submission of the video also had its difficulties due to its large size. It required the downloading and understanding of several softwares to be able to resize the video, send it to the coordinators and upload it on the Moodle.

Apart from these challenges, we are still quite confused about which team members will participate in the project and to what extent they will collaborate. However, we should receive updates on this regard very soon from the project coordinators.

Next steps

From now on, we will focus on the report itself since the next deliverable (i.e. final presentation) is due at the end of April. We planned a skype session in the next few days to work on the outline of the project. We will also start searching more extensively for external information and conduct interviews in our respective cities. 

Weekly Journal #2

Summary of Activities

We are now working on the video progress report due next week. We had to abandon the idea of doing a video in real-time using a skype conference call due to time constraints and the absence of most members of the group.
The idea is now to start the video with a short presentation of all of us, followed by 4 parts on our advancement, strategy, learnings and self-reflection, presented each by a member of the group.
We are still happily using Google Docs to put our toughts together, and it proves an useful tool to enable distance working and tackle the issues that long-distance collaboration involves.


Reflections

One major challenge that we are facing is that we still have not heard at all from two of our group members, and have no information about their status despite being given recurrent assurances that they are in the process of joining. Also we have been informed by Zach that there are some changes on NYU side concerning the organization of the GIM there and that it will impact his collaboration with us. We have not received information from ESADE about these changes and we are currently enquiring about it. These issues have clearly affected our work progress, since we are currently working as half a team, and we have no clear information on how that will evolve in the near future.
Therefore we have not started yet to work on planning interviews and sourcing information about GSK as we had planned in the first week. However we hope that the problems will be soon resolved and that we will be able to make decisive advances in our research from next week onwards.

In the meantime we are striving to make a comprehensive video report.

Team 8

Weekly Journal #1

Summary of Activities

This week marked the beginning of our team's work on the Global Integrative Module. After establishing communication on ESADE's virtual studio, our group held our first conference call over Skype on March 2, with the aim of getting to know each other and determining how to move forward on our first set of deliverables. During that meeting, we made several important decisions regarding communications platforms to use going forward, as well as assigning roles to each team member. We also concluded that the pharmaceutical industry, and specifically GlaxoSmithKline, would be an interesting case study, and decided to move forward with that topic.

We met again over Skype on March 3 to finalize the Definition of Scope and Strategy Documents. After editing, the documents were submitted for review.

Reflections

We consider our first week together a success. After taking some time to get to know each other through forum posts, we found it much easier and to communicate via Skype conference call. We were also quick to decide on several communications channels, with an emphasis on social media platforms. Communicating through social media has made team members more immediately available and helped us get quicker turnaround and feedback when issues arise. The choice of Google Drive as our primary drafting platform was also a good one. The ability to see edits made by other team members to a document in real time proved very valuable as we completed the first set of deliverables.

As we became acquainted with each other, we were also very surprised to discover the highly diverse group of nationalities and backgrounds that made up our team. It's refreshing to be able to work on an assignment with a truly international perspective, and we think these unique viewpoints will enable us to deliver a much more complete project at the end of the day.

Of course, there is always room for improvement. One particular challenge we faced was internal coordination of meeting times and schedules. As always in a virtual team, the time difference between team members presents a very unique dilemma, and it will be very important going forward to coordinate well among ourselves to ensure that each team member has the opportunity to give his or her input.

In addition, a few team members have experienced technical difficulties which have limited their contributions to this point. Hopefully, these technical issues can be resolved soon so that we can attack the next set of deliverables with all hands on deck.

Next Steps

The next deliverable in the GIM is a Video Progress Report, due on March 17th. By that time, we hope to have completed some preliminary research on GlaxoSmithKline's current social initatives as well as potential 'impact areas' where they could make a large difference in people's lives. We also hope to have established communication with some representatives of the company at their offices in our base cities (Barcelona, New York, Milan, and Seoul), with the aim of securing interviews. Finally, we'd like to reach out to GSK's London headquarters with the aim of sending a team member or group of members to England to conduct some on-site research. This will be discussed at our next Skype conference call, scheduled for March 6 at 19:00 (Barcelona time).

Welcome and Introduction

Welcome to the weekly update blog of Team #8 of the Global Integrative Module! The GIM is an international project organised by ESADE Business School in Barcelona. It brings together students from ESADE Business School in Barcelona, NYU Stern School of Business in New York, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi in Milan, and Sogang University in Seoul. These students will work together to offer realistic and implementable solutions to pressing world issues. For this round of the GIM, students must determine why and how companies can contribute to the reduction of economic inequality in the world.

Our team consists of the following members:

• Lauriane Fay, ESADE
• Jina Kim, Sogang
• Eric Lord, Bocconi
• Xavier Mallet, ESADE
• Zack Meher, NYU
• Ji Hyun Son, NYU
• Taro Sotome, ESADE

We have chosen to focus our efforts on studying the role that pharmaceutical companies can play in fighting inequality. Specifically, we will be examining the case of GlaxoSmithKline, one of the largest global pharma corporations. By limiting the scope of our research, we hope to produce a set of recommendations for GSK that are transferable to other companies within the industry.

These weekly journals will offer a recap of our progress, reflections, and next steps as we work toward delivering our recommendations in May.