To put what they have learned in the classroom to the test in the field, more than 900 HBS first-year students embarked in May on the FIELD Global Immersion (FGI), a cornerstone of the MBA Program since 2012. This experiential learning opportunity dispatches students across the globe to collaborate with local business partners, tackling real-world challenges through intensive project work for up to 10 days.

While the novel ideas the students generate for a new product, service, or experience for consumers are often well received by the partner company’s leadership, their development can take time and students may never know if or how their proposals were implemented. So, it came as welcome news when the School’s Global Experience Office, which coordinates FGI, learned that the idea recommended by a student team in 2016 has evolved into a thriving financial education center and incubator in Casablanca. For their project, the six HBS students assigned to work with BMCE Bank (now Bank of Africa) were asked to create a digital product to attract 18 to 24-year-olds to the bank’s services. Since BMCE already had existing university partnerships, the FGI team conducted more than 100 interviews with students in Casablanca, which informed the team’s extensive design thinking process. During their final presentation to their project partner, the HBS students proposed that rather than introduce a digital product, the bank should create a financial education hub where classes and access to financial advisors would be offered to the city’s young people.

The bank and its educational partner, Groupe ISCAE, a prominent business school in Casablanca with other locations in Morocco and Guinea, embraced and expanded on the concept, and together they launched Blue Space, which the bank built and provides funding for on ISCAE’s Casablanca campus. It includes an educational bank branch offering students workspaces and knowledge of the world of banking and finance and an incubator designed to nurture the aspirations of nascent entrepreneurs.

Professor Mohamed Amine Issami, director of Development, International Relations, and Communication at Groupe ISCAE, says that the center aligns with Morocco’s national entrepreneurship strategy, championed by the King of Morocco, which supports entrepreneurs and small-to-medium-sized enterprises with funding and resources.

“That’s why Bank of Africa had two objectives—having a pedagogical banking center to offer insight for our students in order to understand the services the bank offers and also establishing an incubator that monitors all the activity in the region for the entrepreneurs,” says Issami, who oversees the university’s involvement with Blue Space.

By 2020, Bank of Africa had opened the center and ISCAE was ready to launch its program. However, due to the pandemic, they had to adopt a digital approach to working with its initial cohort of five entrepreneurs. Two years later, Blue Space officially launched its 18-month-long in-person entrepreneurship program, and now each cohort can accommodate more than 20 enterprises across a range of services and products. Participants aged 18 to 45 who have been accepted into the program are supported throughout the process of transforming their projects into reality and have access to an educational banking space dedicated to students and owners of incubated projects.

“The incubator aims to develop a new generation of entrepreneurs—young, innovative, and aggressive in terms of competitiveness and productivity,” says Professor Tarik El Malki, director general of Groupe ISCAE, who was instrumental in establishing Blue Space. More recently, Bank of Africa opened another Blue Space incubator in Fez and is encouraging entrepreneurship in other regions as well.

The fruition of the HBS students’ proposal underscores the FGI’s dual objectives, as noted by Alan MacCormack, the MBA Class of 1949 Adjunct Professor of Business Administration and a designer of the FGI experience, who led the 2016 Morocco immersion. One goal, he says, “is to have students tell their project partners something new and identify an opportunity that they hadn’t realized was there.” Another is to broaden students’ understanding that solutions must be contextually adapted. “An idea that would work in Boston might not work in Casablanca,” MacCormack says. “So, there’s a humility in realizing the limitations of your knowledge, and the fact that sometimes you have to discover new knowledge in new places in order to solve problems.”

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