Get involved! Support development of future leaders, with Rikkyo University’s College of Business

Since September 2021, the BCCJ has been proud to work alongside Rikkyo University’s College of Business (COB) and their Advanced Business Project (ABP) course.

This energising 4-month ABP course was created with the goal of supporting the development of future leaders at Rikkyo’s College of Business. Every year, the university invites a company or organisation to collaborate with COB students on a ‘real world’ project that can inform their future business activities and help cultivate future global business professionals.

Associate Professor Gene Thompson, the course instructor, says the class was designed to equip students with strategic communication skills to carry out business activities in English. It’s an elective course for 3rd and 4th–year students and the capstone class of the bilingual business leader development programme of the COB. The course sees a group of both local and exchange students apply their business and intercultural communication knowledge to solve real-world business problems provided by the client company.

BCCJ x ABP Collaboration

The theme for the BCCJ x ABP collaborative project was to “Engage with Regional Japan”. The BCCJ is seeking to expand its membership reach across Japan and evolve into a less Tokyo-centric community – a theme which the students in the ABP course dissected and brainstormed, to create a number of campaigns with the goal of helping the BCCJ engage with potential members, partners and collaborators in the regions of Hokkaido, Chubu, Chugoku and Shikoku.

During their final presentations on January 14, the class presented the BCCJ team and a representative from the BCCJ’s Executive Committee with a number of creative and well-thought out ideas for regional outreach. Presented as both written and oral proposals in English, the projects were followed by questions from the BCCJ and ABP Associate Professor. The proposals included targeted industry-specific links between the UK and Japan, many unknown to the BCCJ team, as well as potential regional collaborators in each of the regions. The students also created outlines for events, to engage both current and potential new members in the regions, and shared detailed ideas for a social media campaign to further support British food and beverage brands across Japan by utilising the benefits of the UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, to name one example.

Get involved!

It has been an absolute pleasure to work with this year’s ABP students, and the BCCJ will certainly be taking forward ideas from their final presentations.

We encourage you to get involved! Rikkyo’s College of Business is looking for their next client company, to begin in the autumn semester (September – January). Each course is shaped according to the needs of the client; past ABP projects have ranged from proposing new strategies for market development, to providing ideas for company branding, to solutions for digital education.

If you are interested in future collaboration with Rikkyo’s College of Business, and supporting the development of future leaders, please get in touch with the BCCJ team at [email protected]. You won’t regret it!