2017 Full-Time IBD Clients
If you have been following our IBD newsletter over the last few months, you may have noticed that we have shared a lot of information about the IBD course, the processes we go through to select IBD Team Leads, and how we assign Team Members to projects. So far we have introduced you to our talented IBD Team Leads and two of our IBD Faculty Mentors. We are very proud of the IBD course, including our hard-working MBA faculty and students and what they bring to the program, but we haven’t yet shared with you information about one of the most important aspects of the IBD program: our clients. Without our valuable clients, the IBD course and the opportunities it affords to Berkeley-Haas MBA students wouldn’t exist.
The first IBD program took place in 1992 with 15 participating MBA students. Since then IBD has worked with over 450 clients in 89 countries. Clients are introduced to IBD through a myriad of channels. IBD Executive Director Kristi Raube and Director of Business Development David Richardson spend countless hours talking with prospective IBD clients and traveling to far-flung destinations to pitch the IBD experience. Berkeley-Haas and UC Berkeley alumni are also a huge part of the process of IBD project development. They act as local ambassadors for our work, helping IBD staff develop and refine a variety of challenging consulting projects worldwide.
Over the many years of its existence, the IBD program has partnered with governments, NGOs, 
nonprofits, social enterprises, entrepreneurs, and companies of all sizes and industries. This year, for example, the Spring 2017 IBD program includes eleven for-profit clients and five nonprofit clients in eleven different industries. To conclude work on their respective IBD projects, our MBA students will end up traveling to Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America.
We are currently partnering with three returning clients from the Spring 2016 IBD program. Nine of our Spring 2017 IBD projects boast a valuable Berkeley-Haas or UC Berkeley alumni connection; four of these have an alum currently working in the organization. No matter how this year’s 16 remarkable client organizations came to be a part of the Spring 2017 IBD course, we are honored and grateful to work with all of them.
