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Imperial Business Analytics
How Imperial students are fighting cyber-attacks and predicting laws Imperial Business Analytics’ Data Spark project is the perfect fusion of business utility and practical education Written by: Ruth Saunders
At Imperial College Business School we spend an awful lot of time talking about how the combination of our faculty’s expertise, our corporate collaborations and our position within Imperial College London means we can fuse real-world business experience with cutting-edge scientific insight. And we go on about it because it’s true. Business School students have the opportunity to develop their skills through a unique combination of resources they simply wouldn’t get anywhere else. One such opportunity is Data Spark, a scheme jointly developed by Imperial Business Analytics and KPMG, where students get consulting experience with business leaders through offering data analytics services. This scheme is now being offered to KPMG clients and other businesses, such as Thomson Reuters and BT Research. Students across MBA and MSc programmes can apply for the scheme: in 2017, over 90 students applied and 40 were awarded places. Director of Imperial Business Analytics, Dr Mark Kennedy, described Data Spark as an opportunity to combine data science and consulting skills: “As students demonstrate and extend their skills in projects of significant strategic importance to the companies who sponsor [them], they also learn consulting skills.” Working alongside academic and business mentors, students on the six-week consulting project gain practical business analytics experience, while the business leaders who offer up their data get access to the School’s sought-after expertise. Student participant and MSc Business Analytics student Christina Tatli described the project to the Financial Times as a service where businesses can “check-in” data for analysis. Mazhar Hussain, Director at KPMG Digital and Analytics said, “The ability to solve complex business problems using analytics has become a competitive differentiator between average and high-performing organisations. This has made it critical for businesses to understand their data and have the ability to interrogate it to make significant business decisions. “This is forcing organisations to become more datadriven in their approach. There is growing demand for organisations to be able to take a hypothesis about their business – whether it is an opportunity or challenge – and test it with agility in a safe environment.”