The international team of the X-Culture project, which included Veronika Chernysheva, a student of GSOM SPbU, studying in the International Management Program, won and entered the top 10 out of 1132 teams from around the world.

This academic year, 6,288 students from 171 universities in 47 countries participated in the project.

The project is implemented within the International Economics and Business course of the International Management Bachelor program. Students from different universities worldwide unite in virtual teams and receive a task related to the development of international aspects of the particular company activities. Teams have two months to develop a solution.

"Projects like X-Culture help to understand how a virtual international team can and should work. It is necessary to find a common language, distribute responsibilities, determine which role suits each of the participants, how to most effectively and quickly solve the proposed task in a team consisting of people of different nationalities with different temperaments, and communicate only online. For example, six of us in the team — people from the USA, Ghana, France, the UAE, and Russia. To solve a business problem, we chose Differ.Chat, a social platform for students. We needed to analyze the existing market and competitors, offer new audiences to promote the company, consider different promotion channels, come up with our layout of a poster, brochure, or post on a social network," Veronika Chernysheva shared. 

SPbU Associate Professor, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship Karina Bogatyreva, who is the curator of the project from the GSOM  SPbU, noted the unique practical experience that students receive in the field of international business by participating in X-Culture.

"On the one hand, the participants solve an applied problem, on the other hand, they work in a cross-cultural team, overcoming obstacles that can be encountered in a real working environment: different time zones, cultural characteristics, level of English proficiency, difficulties of remote communication, etc.," explained Karina Bogatyreva.

The final report on the project is evaluated by several experts from the business and academic world. Along with this, students receive comments from experts. The best teams and individual participants are given awards and invitations to the traditional conference — X-Culture Global Symposium.

X-Culture is a large-scale international experiential learning project in which students from 652 universities from 102 countries have participated since 2010.