Innovation @ Merage - UCI Paul Merage School of Business : From the Classroom

Students Gain Experience in International Collaboration

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:25:00 GMT

Abstract: Global Team Collaboration is an experiential learning course offered at both graduate and undergraduate levels at The Paul Merage School of Business. The brainchild of Merage School Professor Cristina Gibson, an expert in multicultural team collaboration, and Professor Miriam Erez at the Israel Institute of Technology, the course gives students the invaluable experience they will need to succeed in a global team environment.

Published: 2008/2009

Author: Connie Clark

Merage Students Apply Sustained Innovation to Global Social Issues

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:03:00 GMT

Abstract: Merage School students are tackling problems with global implications — like poverty, global warming, school failure, childhood obesity and prison overcrowding. In the Topics in Strategic Innovation class taught by Professors Leonard Lane and Lynda Lawrence, students start with the basics: disruptive and incremental innovation, Blue Ocean Strategy which promotes a systematic approach for “making competition irrelevant,” and a framework for Business Model innovation that involves a culture of ideas, plus the people, practices and partners that can move an idea to a profitable reality.

Published: 2008/2009

Author: John Gregory

UC Irvine’s Merage School of Business Is First to Embed ‘War Games’ into Course Curriculum

admin — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:07:00 GMT

Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and SecondLife are four leading companies in the online world of social networking. What would happen if Apple suddenly jumped into the fray?

That was the challenge posed to 41 students at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business during their day long final examination known as “war games” in Professor Leonard Lane’s strategy and competitive intelligence classes. Rather than huddle over test papers for their final exam, students were assigned either to Facebook, My Space, YouTube or SecondLife teams and spent the day trying to obtain the highest score from four judges. The students’ challenge was to prepare and present long range business plans and then develop, in 45 quick minutes, strategies for Apple’s mock announcement that it was creating “iTown,” a social networking website.

In the real business world, companies use war games to prepare their staff for such situations. The Merage School, according to Lane, is the first educational institution to insert war games into its regular curriculum. Fuld & Company, a competitive intelligence consulting firm, conducted Merage’s war game on June 1.

The Facebook team collected the highest score of the judges—Orange County business executives Chuck Martin, Linda Zimmer, Joel Calvo and Kathryn Campbell. But the final tallies were close. Facebook earned 62.4 points; YouTube, 61; SecondLife, 60.5, and MySpace, 57. The primary reason was that all four teams came to the same conclusion: their company didn’t have to make major strategy shifts when faced with Apple’s entry into the social network space. “iTown, schmi Town,” quipped one of the teams at the start of its presentation.

After the day long exercise, Lane said: “Using war games as the capstone experience of the school’s class in competitive intelligence helps students grapple with realistic learning experiences.”

Published: Summer 2007

Author: John Gregory

Learning on the Edge

admin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:55:00 GMT

Futuristic Course Alerts Students: World Is Changing While You're Studying

By John Gregory

FUTURISTIC COURSE ALERTS STUDENTS:
WORLD IS CHANGING
WHILE YOU’RE STUDYING
By John Gregory

Welcome to edge, the course launched this past Spring to prepare soon-to-graduate, full-time Merage School students to initiate innovation amid emerging new forms of entrepreneurship, international competition, social networking, marketing and organization.

Merage School’s David Obstfeld, assistant professor for strategy, in partnership with technology guru and disruptive innovation expert John Seely Brown, have set out to create a new course that explores how technology and globalization are transforming business by opening markets, transforming industries and erasing boundaries.

“The impetus for edge,” says Obstfeld, “came from (Dean) Andy Policano’s insight that we needed a capstone course to assist students and faculty in exploring important new trends reshaping business.”

A Curriculum Innovation Committee, chaired by Vijay Gurbaxani, the Merage School’s senior associate dean, developed
the preliminary concept of the course, which in its early form was to provide students with the tools to understand how trends in technology, globalization, demographics, and macroeconomics are redefining the business landscape.

“JSB (as Brown is widely known) and I, with Vijay continuing to collaborate with us, designed the course to reflect our belief that we stand on the verge of a dynamic transformation of business and society, and that business schools need to do more to anticipate where such change is taking us,” Obstfeld said.

Obstfeld told his 65 students at the outset, “While you are studying, the world is changing.”

In the opening session, Brown told the students, “The billion-dollar question is, ‘What is the new, emerging common-sense model?’ It’s different from anything we or any civilization has ever experienced. Continual change underlies its infrastructure. Billions in investments are being ripped up and new bets are being made.”

Also in the kick-off session, Professor Gurbaxani explored new ways that information technology continued to reshape value creation and strategic advantage. Obstfeld and Brown pulled together a diverse crop of experts to capture the dramatic changes that edge explores.

For the second session, “Marketing 2.0,” public relations executive Gary Goldhammer, vice president of interactive solutions for Edelman public relations, described how his advertising work is now focused solely on helping major corporations redirect promotions through websites, digital media, viral video and virtual worlds. Goldhammer described how the Web is morphing, indicating that the first stage of the Internet featured the transmission of information. “Now with Web 2.0, social networks connect people peer-to-peer. The media don’t own news anymore; citizens are becoming journalists.”

In the third session, Padhraic Smyth, a professor at UC Irvine’s Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, described the major new strategic opportunities afforded by analyzing the massive data generated by commercial websites.

The following week, John Hagel, a business strategy consultant formerly with McKinsey & Company, traced new business trends in China and India and emphasized that globalization is being reshaped more by new forms of collaboration across organizational and national boundaries than by technology, breakthrough products or access to capital.

To further capture the fluidity of how business communication is being reshaped, edge unveiled a new website, http://edge.merage.uci.edu, a venue for faculty and students to share information, hold dynamic exchanges on class topics and post articles and video links. Several students have set up shop as bloggers, commenting regularly on course proceedings and other issues. (The website also has a forum where the public can engage these issues.)

Students were asked to select one of four options as their final project: identify business opportunities for a Web 2.0 startup; conduct a marketing campaign using video and other rich media; provide strategic analysis for a web-based social network start-up that has already secured venture capital; or consult an Orange County apparel firm, in conjunction with a major Hong Kong global trading company, to determine when and how the local firm could best outsource its manufacturing operations.

Sessions to be held after press deadline included: Social networks, “growing up digital,” and navigating virtual worlds; Virtual commerce and the phenomenon known as “Second Life;” New forms of marketing communication; New forms of leadership and teamwork; and Alternative paths for organizing and competing.

Q&A: Teaching Strategic Innovation

admin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:51:00 GMT

Gary Lindblad, assistant dean and director of the MBA program, spoke with three professors on how the Merage School’s teaching method, stressing strategic innovation, distinguishes it from other business schools. Lindblad talked with Vijay Gurbaxani, senior associate dean for academic affairs and professor of information technology; Mort Pincus, professor of accounting; and Christine Beckman, associate professor of organization and strategy.

Q. Lindblad: How did the Merage School’s thematic approach of business education come about, and how did you decide on the themes of strategic innovation, information technology and analytic decision making?

A. Gurbaxani: Based on our knowledge of what drivers affect business today, we did a lot of research with senior executives, alumni and current students. We found key drivers that essentially enable companies to deliver and manage sustainable, profitable growth.

We identified strategic innovation because that’s what companies in developed countries must focus on in the global economy. Information technology is an enabler of innovation and allows workers to be much more productive and, therefore, more competitive at a higher wage level. However, information technology has made much more data and information available, and managers struggle with how to manage all this information. Our focus on analytic decision making derives from the availability of vast amounts of information.

Pincus: Our accounting courses worry about the volume of information. In my particular area of external financial reporting, we’re trying to understand how companies measure and communicate their activities, including their innovation, their growth plans and their productivity enhancements.

But we must do it in a way so we understand managers’ incentives for reporting and the discretion they have over measuring these activities. And we must do it in a way that conveys what they’re trying to do without giving away proprietary information. It’s a real challenge with all this information available, or being demanded on what a company is doing, while at the same time letting people know what the company is trying to do.

Gurbaxani: Right. It used to be that companies would take two or three months to close their books, then it reduced to a week, and now they may need to do it in 24 hours or less to be successful. It really speaks to the value of information technology. Since we have more pertinent information immediately available, decision making gets better and reflects the state of the business as up-to-date and accurately as possible.

Gurbaxani: So you focus much more on the decision making and much less on the information gathering.

Q. Lindblad: Why is it important that our MBAs develop their own point of view on the changes these influences are making on business today?

A. Gurbaxani: Business has moved from what I would call a fairly steady planning-oriented world, maybe a decade or so ago, to a much more rapidly evolving world. Many of the lessons of the past may or may not apply to the future. So, understanding how to react to these discontinuities is really crucial.

Pincus: The rate of change is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, and it seems only to be increasing. We’re trying to get MBA students to think rigorously, analytically, globally, strategically—and to be very flexible and deal with change.

Beckman: I think of analytic decisionmaking as knowing how to approach a problem, the questions that you need to ask, data that you need to collect and how you want to analyze it. It’s not a specific solution that we’re teaching, it’s a way of approaching a problem and thinking about a problem.

Q. Lindblad: How does this get incorporated into the classroom?

A. Pincus: In my financial accounting course, our perspective is looking at the company as a whole. Right away, most issues are strategic and big picture. Then we can drill down. So it’s not an accounting course per se, it’s an MBA course that teaches some accounting along the way.

As opposed to focusing primarily on teaching someone to be an accountant, we’re teaching the ability to talk to your accountant and understand what he or she is doing. And we’re teaching students how to communicate with other managers either in or outside the company about specific issues such as debt or equity, inventories or investments, stocks, bonds—a whole vocabulary of things.

Before they walk the walk, they’ve got to be able to talk the talk. We’re giving them that talk.

Beckman: A lot of innovation comes from diverse teams expressing different perspectives and encouraging you to think differently. It’s an important part of analytic decision making because you have to be able to defend your position, you have to come up with solutions as a group. That’s a big part of my organizational behavior class—teaching people to make decisions together, where students encourage fellow students to be more creative and more innovative in their solutions.

Gurbaxani: And if you think about the modern organization, teams become particularly important because they’re how innovation occurs. Often these aren’t just single-company teams, but they’re diverse teams from multiple corporations and multiple countries. How you foster innovation, build trust and work are critical.

Beckman: Yes, because the work is happening in a distributed fashion, say, in India, China and here. You’re managing people in three different countries in different time zones. It’s only when everybody’s working together that you end up with an innovative product or service design.

Q. Lindblad: Why is The Paul Merage School of Business a great place for students to grapple with these issues?

A. Gurbaxani: We're one of the very few business schools that confronts head-on the changes that the business world is experiencing. Many business schools continue to offer the traditional curriculum and we, by virtue of being in California – a hightech gateway to the Pacific and the world – deal with these issues much more squarely. The companies that surround us bring these issues to our attention frequently. The faculty here has always been thinking about these issues and being smaller, we’re able to deal with change more easily than some of our traditional competitors.

Beckman: The case studies we choose are very important in distinguishing the school. We pick up on the school’s themes in these cases. In my class, we discuss two cases on innovation. We talk about the organizational structures, reward systems that promote innovation and how technology changes management. We talk about how companies like eBay grew over time and how it’s sustaining growth.

The case studies are really an important way of learning, a way to develop analytic skills, because you’re trying to take all the data and come up with an assessment about how a company got to this point and where they need to go from here.

Gurbaxani: That's right. Everybody can say they do case studies, but our case selection is based on what we believe is important, and that helps define a particular direction for the Merage School. Our focus happens both inside and outside the classroom.