Oxford’s one-year MBA programme places an emphasis on applied learning. As part of this, students have the opportunity to complete two substantial real-world projects:
These projects give you an opportunity to take the knowledge and skills you have gained and put them to the test.
Entrepreneurship Project
The Entrepreneurship Course and Project challenges students to develop a complete business plan and present it to a panel of invited venture capitalists and other practitioners. Recent projects have included: simplifying technologies for the developmentally challenged, the development of a hedge fund, the commercialisation of a technology for conditioning household furnishings and a consultancy firm providing technical safety management expertise to the Chinese mining industry. If you already run a business this is a great chance to develop new products or business models in a safe environment.
Completed plans must be attractive to the professional investor. The numbers must add up, patents must be in place, the competition must have been understood and a winning strategy developed. It is often said that investors care more about the management than the plan – in this case the management will be you. Some students use the Entrepreneurship Project to develop a plan for a new business, and then take their plan forward through the Strategic Consulting Project at the culmination of the course.
Snapcart
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Michael focused his entrepreneurship project on SnapCart, which won first prize at the Saïd Business School Venture Fund Competition 2010. 
"SnapCart is an online marketplace for photographs, a peer-to-peer site where someone could upload a picture of an Oxford cricket match to our site and I could buy it.” SnapCart will do all the printing and distribution, taking a percentage of the photographer’s sale. “It takes the admin away from the photographer – something most don’t like doing.”
Michael says, "we had to put in an executive summary together to get to semis, then form a business plan and pitch the idea to the Venture Fund board, mostly MBA students, 12 of whom were my classmates,” says Michael. “They asked lots of background questions but we got through to the final with 14 others, where pitched to 400 people including Philip Green and David Bonderman. Somehow this was easier than pitching to co-students!”
Having been offered VC money from a company in London prior to making the finals, Michael was confident his idea was a winner. Since the finals, three more interested VCs have made contact, and the company is currently in negotiations to finalise funding. The site launches this September, initially targeted at the UK market but expanding quickly to the USA. Within five years the aim is to have 50,000 photographers using the platform and then consider a sale – in which interest has already been expressed |