Kent Business Clinic

Kent Business clinic

Talk to us about your business challenge

Fresh thinking on real business challenges

Could a team of talented postgraduate students help you look at a business challenge differently?

Kent Business Clinic connects businesses and organisations with multidisciplinary teams of Kent Business School Master’s students who are developing their professional practice through real-world consultancy.

You bring us a genuine challenge. Our students bring curiosity, research, analysis and fresh thinking – working together to explore the issue and present practical, evidence-based recommendations.

What could you challenge our students to solve?

Perhaps there is a project you have been meaning to explore but never quite have the time or capacity to investigate. You might want to understand a new market, make better use of technology, improve a process or gain a fresh perspective on an organisational challenge.

Kent Business Clinic can consider challenges across a wide range of business areas, including:

  • market research, customer insight and market validation
  • digital transformation and technology adoption
  • AI and its application within organisations
  • marketing, communications and customer engagement
  • new products, services and business opportunities
  • organisational and people challenges
  • operations, processes and productivity
  • supply chain and sustainability
  • strategy, growth and innovation.

These are examples rather than limits. If you have a challenge that would benefit from research, analysis and a fresh pair of eyes, we would like to hear about it.

The strongest projects have a clear question or challenge at their heart and are sufficiently focused for a student team to investigate and develop meaningful recommendations.

What does taking part involve?

We want working with the Business Clinic to be valuable without placing unnecessary demands on your organisation.

We will work with you to shape an appropriate project brief. Typically, we will ask you to:

  • introduce your organisation and present the challenge to the student team
  • provide relevant background information or data, where appropriate and available
  • be available for reasonable contact during the project
  • attend the students’ final presentation and hear their findings and recommendations.

Beyond this, the level of interaction is up to you. Site visits, meetings with colleagues, access to customers or other opportunities to understand your organisation can add considerably to the students’ insight, but these can be agreed according to the needs of the project and what works for your organisation.

Timings

Our main consultancy projects run between October and March, aligned with the students’ Professional Practice programme.

However, conversations do not need to wait for the start of the academic year.

Kent Business Clinic is open to discussions with businesses and organisations throughout the year. Talking to us early gives us the opportunity to explore your challenge with you, shape it into an appropriate project and identify the best opportunity for students to work with you.

Who can take part?

We welcome conversations with organisations of different sizes and from different sectors.

You might be a growing small business with an opportunity you want to test, an established company considering a new market or technology, a charity or social enterprise seeking to increase its impact, or a larger organisation looking for fresh thinking on a particular business challenge.

What matters most is that you have a real question worth exploring and are willing to engage with our students as they investigate it.

You do not need to arrive with a fully formed consultancy brief. Tell us about your organisation, the challenge or opportunity you are facing and what you would like to understand or change.

We can work with you to explore whether it could become a Kent Business Clinic project.

Talk to us about a challenge

Barretts Kent: turning operational data into practical recommendations

The challenge: How could Barretts improve throughput and workforce planning within its Vehicle Preparation Centre? Students visited the operation, analysed business data, mapped the vehicle preparation process and benchmarked industry practice before presenting recommendations back to the business. Their analysis helped validate issues Barretts had already suspected while providing evidence and recommendations to inform future decisions. Neil Relph, Head of Business at Barretts, said the students had provided: "A valuable external perspective, producing conclusions comparable with those of people with many years of industry experience."

Enterprise Mobility: understanding the next generation of talent

The challenge: How could Enterprise Mobility better attract students to its placement opportunities and graduate training programmes? The team researched student motivations and behaviours, employer perceptions and competitor approaches before developing recommendations to improve the graduate recruitment journey. Enterprise Mobility described the recommendations as impactful, and indicated some would be taken forward with its marketing team.

Macknade: fresh thinking with commercial value

Students working with Kent food and drink business Macknade tackled live business challenges spanning sourcing, operations, digital transformation and other commercial challenges. Macknade CEO Stefano Cuomo said the standard of work matched work he had received from commercial agencies, with recommendations feeding into internal projects.

Port of Dover: bringing fresh thinking to complex business challenges

Student teams working with Port of Dover took on projects encompassing areas including AI and contract management. The Port said it was delighted with what the teams had achieved within the project timeframe, demonstrating the potential for students to engage with complex challenges in large organisations as well as SMEs.