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.

Innovation @ Merage - UCI Paul Merage School of Business : Strategy/Vision, Methodology, Ideation, From the Classroom

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

Learning on the Edge