The story of how 106 Kent Business School students worked with Port of Dover, Macknade, Barretts Kent, and Enterprise Mobility to deliver real business impact.<\/p>\n
By Khawar Naveed Bhatti<\/p>\n
The idea behind the challenge<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n The KBS Challenge was designed around a simple belief: students learn differently when the work is real, the audience is real, and the outcome matters beyond the assessment. When students are trusted with live problems and real stakeholders, their knowledge stops being something they simply demonstrate for marks; it becomes something they apply in response to the challenge in front of them.<\/p>\n Early on, one student described the experience as being \u201cthrown in the deep end\u201d: working directly with senior business representatives, navigating live organisational problems, and having to make decisions without any handholding. In many ways, that was exactly the point. In the world of work, problems rarely arrive fully defined, and professionals often have to create structure where none yet exists. The KBS Challenge was designed to give students that experience. It did not remove the difficulty; instead, it placed the right structure around it, so students could experience the pressure, uncertainty and responsibility of professional work while still being supported to succeed.<\/p>\n The challenge in numbers<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n Across eight weeks, the KBS Challenge brought together 106 students from across Kent Business School: 76 from Canterbury and 30 from Medway. Students worked in 15 consultancy teams across 10 live projects, supported by four external organisations: Port of Dover, Macknade, Barretts Kent, and Enterprise Mobility.<\/p>\n These were not theoretical case studies. Student teams visited business sites, engaged directly with senior business representatives, and each group was asked to produce recommendations that could be presented back to the organisation. Alongside the project work, students were supported by 10 guest speakers, including CEOs, Managing Directors, Directors, Heads of Department, managers and project leads. Before presenting to the businesses, mock presentations were reviewed by a panel of eight academic colleagues from different areas of expertise.<\/p>\n Students rose to the challenge<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n The KBS Challenge quickly became something that felt less like a traditional module to students and more like a live consultancy programme: one real enough to test them harder than anything else in their university careers. They had to move from \u201cwhat does the theory say?\u201d to \u201cwhat does this organisation actually need, and what can we realistically recommend?\u201d The students rose to the challenge and delivered.<\/p>\n The range of work was deliberately broad, reflecting the kinds of messy, cross-functional problems businesses actually face. The snapshots below give a flavour of the work students produced across the four organisations, from AI and contract management to operations, marketing analytics, sourcing and digital transformation.<\/p>\n\n\t\t