MBA Idea No. 14: Free MBA labor

August 5, 2010 · Posted in Launching 

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31Projects connects MBA students with consulting projects from companies.

“Our vision is to provide an open platform where all organizations, regardless of size or resources, can easily and effectively identify and recruit the talent they need to be globally competitive. The projects and competitions are win‐win situations for both organizations and students, and can be used by employers to create a highly effective pipeline of top student talent into their organization.” says founder and CEO Jon Reifschneider.

Market Guesstimate: According to the Graduate Management Admission Council there are around 1,900 business schools in the world and 4,750 graduate management education programs in 2010. Suppose each business school had 100 students interested in 31Projects. That’s a potential audience of about 190,000 students. Given a 80 hour project at $50 an hour, that’s about a $760M free labor market.

The site is preparing to launch in fall with an impressive line-up of top tier programs:

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Alternatively, you can post projects at MBA schools directly, such as Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Cornell’s Johnson School.

More on founder of 31Projects:

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Jon Reifschneider, Founder & CEO

31Projects founder Jon Reifschneider has seen first- hand the value of employing students to address business challenges, having both conducted projects for companies as a student and led such projects as an company sponsor.  Jon founded 31Projects after finishing business school to serve the needs of businesses and students, which have been further exacerbated on both sides during the recent recession.

Prior to founding 31Projects, Jon assisted in the management of a corporate venture fund and led commercialization efforts for new service innovations in the U.S. and Europe for SES. He also worked in technology commercialization and new ventures for Siemens Technology Accelerator and W.L. Gore & Associates. Jon holds an MBA from the European Business School, a Master of Engineering Management from Duke University, and a B.S. Summa cum laude from the University of Virginia.

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  • Sue

    You might also check http://internships.com. They're the biggest marketplace I think. Not sure how 31 projects is going to be differentiated. If it focuses just on top school internships it's a pretty small market. Also, most top schools get bombarded with people asking for free labor, I doubt they'd go to a destination site…

  • Jon Reifschneider

    Hi Ian, thanks for including 31Projects on your site! My name is Jon Reifschneider and I'm the founder. I wanted to clarify a couple points in the post and the comment from Sue. While we let the sponsors choose how much they are willing to pay the students (and we give them the option to do a pro-bono project), in most cases there is a monetary compensation for the students as well as the other benefits of gaining experience, building connections, etc.

    To Sue's question about how we are differentiated from the number of internship job boards out there, the answer is that we are connecting students through short-term projects and competitions rather than internships. It's been our experience that many companies need help with particular challenges they face but don't want to get locked into having an intern for several months, and so rather than employing an intern we enable them to engage a student or a team of students in working exclusively on the particular project they have, typically virtually and on the students' schedule rather than having set hours per week. It's more like a freelance consulting project than an internship where the engagement ends once the project is completed. The Challenge competitions are a different animal- these are crowdsourcing-style competitions where a company posts a challenge and engages the community of students in developing ideas/solutions.

    And lastly regarding exclusivity of the platform- we do not restrict access to particular top schools. There is however an application process just to ensure that all student members are well qualified to participate.

    Thanks again for featuring us!

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