Axcelead DDP Selected as Project Partner for Harvard Business School Immersive Field Course

2023.02.03

Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners Inc. (Head Office: Fujisawa, Kanagawa prefecture, CEO: Yoshinori Ikeura, “Axcelead DDP”) was selected as a Project Partner for Harvard Business School’s Immersive Field Course in last October and in this January, we hosted a team of 4 students from this course for approximately 1 week, offering them an experiential learning opportunity.

The Immersive Field Course (“IFC”) from Harvard Business School (“HBS”) is a second-year MBA elective course in which teaching objectives are met through student-centered active learning opportunities including project work, site visits, speakers and participation in discussions with senior leadership. Second-year students who has enrolled in the Japan IFC gain the opportunity for experiential learning by actually visiting a company that they have chosen from among 9 Tokyo project partner companies..

Students on the IFC are typically in their late 20’s and have an average of 5 yearsexperience of work in a range of fields, including finance, real estate, consulting, healthcare, the military and technology etc. Students are divided into small, diverse teams, and collect and analyze market research and other information on the companies selected as Project Partners, and, through processes such as on-site exchanges of opinions, they make proposals for solving a current challenge for the company.

Yoshinori Ikeura, President and CEO of Axcelead DDP, said,  “We are pleased to be selected as a Project Partner for this course, and to be able to work with HBS to provide students with a real-world learning experience in Japanese society. Through interviews and discussions with our employees, the students who visited our company earnestly studied our business model as a drug discovery solutions provider, which is unique within Japan, and our employees, in turn, were stimulated by ideas from the students’ fresh perspectives, and had the opportunity to gain new insights. The students made the most of their fresh thinking and innovative ideas, providing valuable proposals to our senior members, and I am certain that here in Shonan, they were able to learn from experiences that they would never be able to glean from classroom lectures or discussions alone.”