4 September 2019, Geneva, Switzerland - Strategy consultants from Simon-Kucher & Partners visited UNITAR over the summer to explore and assess new income streams for growth. Simon-Kucher is a global strategy consulting firm focusing on strategy, marketing, pricing and sales, with more than 1400 employees in 39 global offices. Simon-Kucher provided its services to UNITAR on a pro-bono basis as part of its corporate social responsibility initiative. Brook Boyer, Director for Strategic Planning and Performance, welcomed the engagement with Simon-Kucher, as UNITAR is reviewing its approaches to mobilizing resources, including its existing revenue model for fee-based courses, competitiveness and considering new approaches to growth, such as platform hosting arrangements. By engaging UNITAR Directors and Managers in a participative thinking process, the experts identified various avenues for Management’s consideration, including optimizing pricing, providing new, add-on services and defining targets for hosted platform arrangement, among other proposals. UNITAR Executive Director, Nikhil Seth, indicated that the recommendations flowing from the exercise proved to be highly timely, useful and actionable, and that UNITAR would be taking several forward for immediate implementation as part of the Institute’s new partnership models and business innovations work.

Photo: Simon-Kucher’s Geneva-based team Mehdi Damak (left), Thomas Hofmann (centre-right) and Florian Fleischer (right) with Brook Boyer of UNITAR (centre left) at the conclusion of the Final Presentation of Results Workshop.