Yes we have now slipped into Fall. I begin teaching on this coming Friday 9/7. A warm welcome to all the incoming students at HBS, especially sections A & D. We have forty sessions ahead of us in the Technology and Operations Management core class. We go from Japanese restaurants to cranberry factories to pasta distributors to the Americas Cup and stop at Threadless. Its going to be quite a ride!
A common reaction after reading an HBS case is: “So what happened? How come there are no conclusions and recommendations?” Welcome to the world of case-based teaching! A good overview of the case-based teaching method is here. Here are few excerpts about what we tell our new students about case-based teaching: (If there are some MBA 2008 - Section E students reading my blog - instead of their assigned cases - they may also want to pipe in on the comments about the case method and their experience with it):
Yesterday, my colleague Andrew McAfee and I just published a Harvard Business School Case on Wikipedia. In the spirit of Wikipedia we have released this under a GFDL license. Andrew and I will teach it in his second year MBA course on Managing in the Information Age this coming April. At HBS, all courses are taught via the case method, which means no lecturing by professors. HBS cases are designed to have a “managerial” decision point - which forces students to choose between several alternatives and come prepared to class to discuss their rationale for their choices. A case discussion is typically 80 minutes long with the goal of having the students engage in discussion with each other and the professor to develop a particular point of view about the case facts. In a case discussion, “there are no RIGHT answers - but there are WRONG answers!” My role as a professor is to make sure that the main teaching points in the case come out via the discussion with the students.
The case aims to get students familiar with the inner workings of a distributed community and to grapple with issues related to authority, decision making, expertise and norms of behavior in a community setting. The MBA curriculum at most business schools does a decent job of exposing students to managerial issues inside of hierarchical organizations. However, there is very little as it pertains to the emerging paradigm of distributed innovation. We just don’t know enough about what it takes to “manage” an innovation community. Can you even manage one? How do you build one? How do you sustain it? What kills a community?
I think there is a lot of wisdom about it in practice, i.e. people that are going about seeding, building and sustaining community and know how difficult it is to build communities. Our hope with this case (and others to come) is to engage our students to think seriously about communities inside and outside of firms and how they themselves can be participants in them.
I welcome your feedback on the case.
Andrew’s blog post about the case is here.