For Businesses
150 universities
40 countries
6 continents
working on your business challenge
5 Reasons to Partner with X-Culture
2 heads better than 1.
2000 heads better than 2.
- Receive creative ideas
Got a business challenge?
Thousands of MBA and business students from around the world will offer you their solutions.
Tomorrow, they’ll graduate and command hefty salaries. Today, they’ll work for you as part of their coursework. - Enter new markets
Ready to expand into new markets?
X-Culture participants come from 40+ countries.
They will find the most promising markets for your product, develop your market entry strategy,
and help you find local partners and retailers. - Promote your products
Promote your products among hundreds of International Business professors and thousands of business students who could be your clients or partners tomorrow. - Recruit talent
Thousands of students from some of the world’s best universities take part in X-Culture every semester.
We continuously track their performance: from teamwork and leadership skills, to creativity and diligence.
You need the best?
We identify the best, based on objective performance data no job interview or resume can ever provide. - Train employees
Do your employees have to interact internationally?
We can help with training in international teamwork, virtual collaboration tools, and dealing with cultural and time-zone differences.
Professional Consultants or Crowd-sourcing?
Crowds eat experts for breakfast.
Experts wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it ruled for 250 years. Then amateurs wrote Wikipedia.
On Who Want’s to be Millionaire, “Call the expert” helpline results in 57% accuracy. “Ask the audience” gives 94% accuracy.
There will be always a need for experts. However, on some tasks crowds consistently outperform experts.
- Crowd-creation
A large diverse crowd beats an expert at generating ideas.
The crowd has access to more pools of knowledge, more networks, more sources of inspirations. Crowds have more ideas and leads to work with. - Crowd-labor
Who are your global competitors? How do they run their businesses?
Sure an expert can google thousands of sites in dozens of languages and get you the answers. But a crowd will get you better answers faster. - Crowd-prediction
What’s the best price for a given market? What the best design?
Ask a crowd and their average prediction will be more accurate than the prediction made by an expert. - Crowd-outreach
Need to find local distributors? Test demand in dozens of new markets?
Using a crowd to solve your problem is like sending thousands of ants to search for food. If there is something good out there, they will find it.
X-Culture or Other Crowd Platforms?
Crowds need the right process.
X-Culture knows process.
There are many crowd-sourcing platforms.
Most of them use a primitive “free-lancer” process.
They broadcast your challenge and hope someone will bring you a good answer.
That’s yesterday. X-Culture uses a better process.
We test dozens of ways to organize a crowd.
We collect tons of data. We constantly experiment.
We constantly improve our crowdsourcing process.
Our crowd members interact.
They compete.
They collaborate.
They borrow ideas.
They build upon ideas of others.
They argue.
They critique.
They learn from one another other.
Then, they take the best ideas and develop them further.
The “free-lancer” crowd is only as smart as the smartest member of the crowd.
The X-Culture crowd develops ideas that even the smartest crowd members could not have developed alone.
The X-Culture process is better.
Our crowd is smarter than other crowds.
More on the science behind X-Culture’s problem solving model here.
How X-Culture Works
A small step for you. A giant leap for your business.
Level 1. Crowd-sourcing
- You contact us to talk about your business. We tell you about X-Culture.
- If we can help, you become an X-Culture partner.
- Thousands of students around the world work on solving your challenge.
- The students also reach out to local distributors and try to get you contracts in their markets.
- We organize two, one-hour live webinars.
- First, you tell more about your business and answer students’ questions.
- Later, students present their preliminary results to you and you provide feedback.
- We send you the reports and contract leads identified by the students.
Level 2: Expert Reinforcement (Optional)
- The teams that authored the best ideas collaborate with business professors and experienced consultants.
- They further develop the ideas and prepare a professional report, strategy, product design, or other requested deliverable.
Level 3. Implementation (Optional)
- We further strengthen the team with subject experts.
- They implement the solution and help you take your company to the next level.
Sample Challenges
- Mercedes-Benz: How do we design a truck for developing countries?
- Home Depot: How do we improve our .com services?
- Louis Vuitton: Where should we open our next store and what store design would be most appealing to the customers there?
- Caffè Vergnano: How to build a global coffee house network?
- Polaris Industries: How to grow the sales of snowmobiles in Asia?
- Hard Rock International: How do we make our restaurants, hotels and casinos more appealing to young people?
Other partners
Sykes (USA, call centers), Innospark (Lithuania, educational toys), Me Late Chocolate (Colombia, chocolate), JCB (UK, tractors, excavators), Forcier (USA, research in war zones), Trasluz (Spain, children’s clothing), Sacona (India, 5D gaming stations and flight simulators); Daffodils Gaming (Ghana, board games), Gramedia (Indonesia, newspapers and TV), Odyseed (Belgium, indoor greenhouses), Pontafola d’Oro (Italy, shoes), UniCheck (Ukraine, plagiarism detection software), Plastic Revolutions (USA, recycling plants)
Suggested Pricing
Hiring a class of business students to work on your project is not cheap.
Most business schools charge $5,000 to $30,000 for a class of MBA students of up to 100 people.
It makes sense: once these people get their BS and MBA degrees, they will cost a lot more to hire.
X-Culture offers a number of advantages over a regular class of students:
- Thousands (not dozens or hundreds) bright young professionals
- A highly diverse crowd to ensure a greater variety of ideas
- A geographically dispersed crowd to ensure access to local knowledge anywhere on the planet
Suggested pricing for one semester of Level 1 partnership:
- Large company: $20,000
- Medium company: $10,000
- Medium company: $5,000
- Startup: $1,000
The partnership fee can be reduced for companies from developing countries or companies with a particularly interesting challenge.
Level 2 and Level 3 partnership fee set individually depending on the complexity of the case.
High-resolution printable pamphlet for businesses PDF