Expansion of a startup in Asia: iaelyon students give their recommendations.
Evènement | November 22, 2016
Founded in 2012, neolid is a Lyon startup that designs and markets isothermal mugs and lidless lunch boxes. In 2016, the company decided to reinforce its presence in Asia and targeted two priority markets: South Korea and Japan. Within this context, a collaboration with iaelyon Master’s students in the International Business Realities Program was initiated.
Products of the neolid company follow the current trend of the on-the-go consumption. 33% of the company turnover come from exports and the products are sold in approximately 20 countries. The company has also recently started running a crowdfunding campaign. Despite its recent creation and its very small size, neolid has everything it takes to succeed. It was an attractive challenge for English-speaking Master’s students in the 1st year of the International Business Realities Program. They met Nicolas Frolin, founding CEO of neolid at the beginning of October who introduced his company and further explained the issue of the Korean and Japanese markets.Students worked on a market analysis in order to give recommendations for the development of the startup in these two countries. Noémie DOMINGUEZ, Associate Professor at iaelyon and Academic Director of the 1st year of Master’s in International Business Realities, who supervised the analysis and oversaw student research, explains: “The idea is to confront students to the reality of startups and to show to them all the steps of the international development of a small company. The project and the ambition of the company founder aroused the students’ curiosity”.
After a couple of weeks, Nicolas Frolin came back to iaelyon to attend student presentations and discuss their recommendations. “The work is of very high-quality. Students have collected primary and secondary data on Korean and Japanese markets. Exchanges were very fruitful and gave us interesting guidelines and actions to develop our activities. We very much appreciated the collaboration and have planned to apply several recommendations we have been given.”
The collaboration will go on with the writing of an academic case study which will be published at the “Centrale de Cas et de Médias Pédagogiques” (CCMP, “Academic Cases and Media Organization”, Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Paris). Ulrike Mayrhofer, Full Professor, Vice-Dean Corporate Relations, and Academic Director of the International MBA explains: “We wish to associate companies with our education and our Research works. The experiences that have been conducted allow students in our programs to deal with real case situations they would face in their professional life, and also enrich our Research activities”.
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