Published:
This month we hosted the inaugural Greenhouse Project event. The Greenhouse Project is a postgraduate student business consultancy in partnership with the Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank Group (CYBG).
The Greenhouse project aims to become an annual national programme that is tailor-made by CYBG to facilitate the growth of their small medium enterprise (SME) business clients, whilst equally providing Heriot-Watt students with new business skills and experience. Heriot-Watt is an early stage partner of this exciting project together with the Universities of Stirling, Birmingham, Manchester Met, Salford, Strathclyde and Sheffield Hallam.
“Our business is a small, farming community and this next business venture is new and quite scary territory. To get this support and so many ideas on strategy and where to go next has been amazing.”
We are proud to have 20 Postgraduate students taking part from all across the business management suite of programmes. Working with them are seven SME businesses as listed below. The focus of this inaugural event included digital marketing, strategic product development, eCommerce solutions, optimal remuneration packages and dynamic pricing for key accounts. Our academic faculty will be working closely with our student teams throughout this project to guide and assist them when required. The teams were matched to at least two academics to be the friendly face or voice of reason' during this project.
At the conclusion of the project (in one months' time) our students will present their analysis to the management teams & boards at each of the SME's.
“To work in the real world with a real business is so important. Now we know if our ideas are good or not and it's been particularly good for our confidence too!”
The kick of event allowed the teams to meet with the SMEs and vice verca, they worked through the business problems and then embarked on a tour of the new HWU GRID facility with their SME colleagues.