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Harvard plans to send nearly all of its entering business school students to a range of far-flung locales across the world in an ambitious week-long immersion program.

(Poets&Quants) -- For the Harvard Business School, it is the academic equivalent of Operation Overlord.

Next month, the school that made the MBA one of the world's most valuable credentials will launch an invasion of more than 900 MBA students, roughly 20 professors and 40 staff members around the world as part of a new and highly ambitious weeklong global immersion experience.

Some 152 six-student teams of Harvard MBAs will board airplanes bound for a dozen far-flung cities in 10 countries that range from Argentina and Brazil, to China and India. Once there, they'll hook up with one of 140 organizations to create a new product or service for a developing market.

In Vietnam, a team will help to create flood insurance that can be sold to locals. In China, another team will work to develop a new kind of automobile tire. In Ghana, students will work with L'Oreal to help the company redesign a hair product for the local market.

For the first time in its 103-year history, the school is shipping nearly an entire class of MBA students abroad, all at the same time. The goal: To equip Harvard MBAs for business in a global world.

A logistical nightmare?

The school had to line up more than 150 meaningful projects with some 140 multinational companies, small businesses, and non-profits. It had to process hundreds of visas, arrange air travel, and hotel accommodations for nearly 1,000 travelers to locales as varied as Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo, Accra and Cape Town, Ho Chi Minh City and Istanbul, Chongqing and Shanghai, Mumbai and Chennai.

At one point, Harvard University's new innovation lab was turned into an immunization clinic to vaccinate hundreds of students over three days. A car and driver had to be hired for each student team -- and Harvard screened and then trained the drivers to ensure they could speak English and efficiently transport the teams to different locations for on-the-ground research. Before booking accommodations, Harvard staffers were dispatched to each hotel to test the reliability of its Internet service and find backups in case something goes amiss.

For every 45 students, Harvard has generally assigned one professor and two staffers. A pair of projects had to be set up in Boston for students who could not travel for personal reasons.

"The amount of planning has been extraordinary," says Youngme Moon, a marketing professor who is chair of Harvard's MBA program. "But this is HBS, so we feel there is an expectation of quality, consistency, and reliability. If we are truly going to become a global organization, we have to learn how to do this and do it by scale."

Faculty across all the different disciplines, from finance to marketing, worked together on this project. "We had to break down the silos and boundaries and … work together as a school in a way we never had," says Moon.

Read more on http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/12/15/harvards-grand-experiment-send-900-biz-students-abroad/

From Management Fortune - CNN