A WIN-WIN collaboration, erasmus style
Posted on 5 March 2017 by Valeria Passarelli, TOPP Marketing Team & Corporate Communications
We are pleased to announce the completion of the first of several ERASMUS exchange programs which will be aimed at engaging European resources available in the academic world who are looking to gain 'on-the-job' business experience in exchange for credit at their university towards their degree.
Our debut collaboration started last November with the International Hellenic University, famous for being the first Greek public university where all programmes are taught exclusively in English. Dimitrios Dellios, master student from the IHU School of Economics, Business Administration & Legal Studies partnered with us for four months giving us his full time support and access to the many business resources available through the university.
'As a young and small company relying on our ability to offer creativity and innovation in the field of automated business solution design, this was an optimal opportunity to get an idea as to how mainstream university education is currently preparing our soon-to-be business professionals' said Andrew Lenti, TOPP TI CEO who worked directly with Dimitrios together with TOPP TI Chief Financial Officer Martin Higgs in structuring his curriculum which included a master thesis document of more than 80 pages of market research.
While collaborating at TOPP TI, Dellios held the position of Erasmus Plus trainee working on a detailed Business Plan as part of his mastery project. By leveraging the professional resources and network of IHU, Dellios brought TOPP TI fundamental problem solving concepts, contemporary tools, techniques and best practices of multi disciplinary activities such as marketing, entrepreneurship, strategy, corporate governance, Human Resource management and Project Management.
Upon completing his assignment, Dimitrios received a Masters in Business Administration and has since moved on accepting a role as a program manager for a business transformation initiative at a multinational financial organisation in Luxembourg.
Dimitrios Dellios
The thesis
Lenti added, 'The content of Dimitrios's thesis naturally provided our team an overall SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) giving increased visibility into market trends, sales channels, potential competitive pitfalls, additional ideas on how to tailor our product and even allowed for us to generate a few client leads based on his recommendations'.
Since its completion, we have received interest from additional students in the European community to participate in similar programmes as well as having received a request for collaboration from a prestigious US-based university notable for its business programme.
For more information on collaborating with us in an ERASMUS or student internship program, please contact us at: www.toppti.com/contact/ or e-mail us at [email protected]
Thank you Dimitrios
Dellio's effort in uncovering market opportunities included partnering with our Marketing Team to use statistical data in articulating the TOPP TI value proposition of offering increased transparency to organisations who are seeking to install a long-term continuous improvement discipline at the line level
In his acclaimed study, Sidney Yoshida concluded that 96% of problems are not known to top management creating an 'Iceberg of Ignorance' of which Dellios used such studies to base the major part of his thesis supporting the TOPP TI business model and the 360° visibility which our products such as our continuous improvement cloud-based solution PRESTO (see right) (see below) bring to the market.
