You might be wondering what other things we are doing along the way. Yes, that’s right, we are not only manufacturing rugged mobile computers. In early 2021, we started an industry-university collaboration with Sogang University (서강대학교) in Mapo-gu, Seoul, to support and teach a group of MBA students during their course about understanding and executing digital transformation. The lecture is led by Professor Heung-soon Jang, who holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from KAIST.
Taking Point Mobile as an example for digital transformation
In the era of Industry 4.0, Big Data and IoT (to name a few buzzwords), companies need to constantly adjust to new technologies to meet customer requirements, while almost all departments of a company undergo digitalization in one way or another. The goal of this course is to analyze existing processes, identify drawbacks, and find ways to improve them. Our company saw a great chance here: Not only do we get to take a very close look into the mirror, but also interact with people with the very precious advantage of the “outside view”. They don’t know us, they don’t know our industry, and they are not biased in any way. This combined with our knowledge and expertise and seeing how all of this interrelates seemed an opportunity too good to pass up.
We divided a total of eleven students into four teams to cover four main topics: Global marketing strategy, human resources management, corporate culture, and increasing brand awareness. Next, we assigned Point Mobile department heads for each team to act as mentors and support the students.
Analyzing and evaluating
Now it was time to get to know each other better. To analyze our company and fully understand who we are and what we are doing, each department gave an introduction about their daily tasks, strategy and future plans. We explained about how our brand has been changing and evolving over the years, how we intensified our focus on digital marketing, how we launch new products and services, or how COVID-19 has affected us. The students’ job was then to collect all that information, carefully evaluate it, and then come up with ideas and suggestions to further improve processes towards digitalization. In the next couple of weeks, the teams were working at full speed. We then met again in our Headquarters for a follow up, and were surprised to hear about all the information about us and our industry the students have collected. Each team presented their results and ideas about what they thought Point Mobile should adjust, improve, or simply do differently – always with digital transformation in mind.
Industry-university collaboration as a catalyst for great ideas
For both Point Mobile staff and Sogang University students, this type of industry-university collaboration is an immensely great way to combine theoretical knowledge and practical experience: We profit from highly qualified students, and in return, they get insights to our B2B know-how and learn best practices from the real world. As a result, we all learn a lot from each other, which already led to some great ideas and new directions our company is heading to. The collaboration for this project is going to be finished in a couple of weeks, but we are thrilled to team up again to support next years’ MBA students.
Learn more about Sogang University ➜
