CSI: The final stretch of the IMHI Marathon

By Marion Neveu, MBA in Hospitality Management, France, 2013-2015 2nd Year

Here we are, last trimester, last mandatory course at IMHI, Competitive Strategic Intelligence. In this class, taught by Nicolas Graf and Stefan Gröschl, we are being asked to work as consultant for different companies: either for AccorHotels, Street (Norman Kolton entrepreneurship project) or personal students’ projects.

CSI is a long process that allows us to answer a mission given by each company. With my group, we have been asked by Accor to answer to: “What services or products could be pushed/proposed to Accor customers throughout their customer journey, once we have Big Data?"

The class is structured around 4 assignments, followed by a final report and a presentation. In the first assignment, we had to identify what is going to happen in the future followed by the opportunities we can get out of these trends.

The following assignment asked us to forecast the impact of these trends on the environment of the company: how will the evolution of social life impact Accor, its suppliers, its regulators or its customers, which is called the “task environment”.  The other two assignments look at competitive methods: "what bundle of services and products will help the company to be competitive in the future?" and core competencies: "what has to be set so that the company can effectively use these competitive methods?"

In order to answer to these questions, we had to perform a lot of research, analyses and brainstorming. The CSI course challenged us a lot: justifying what is going to happen and defining what will give Accor the tools to be efficient in the future is not easy to do. Of course, we also had short deadlines to meet! 

As the final step of the IMHI program, the CSI class is asking us to put into practice everything we’ve been taught at IMHI. It is therefore a good test to evaluate our skills and competencies: Are we ready for working life?