How Harvard Business School Will Tackle Its Online Course; Clash of Two Models

choi

Jerry Useem, B-School, Disrupted; In moving into online education, Harvard discovered that it wasn’t so easy to practice what it teaches. New York Times, May 31, 2014.
www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/busin ... hool-disrupted.html

Quote:

“At Harvard Business School, the pros and cons of the argument were personified by two of its most famous faculty members. For Michael Porter, widely considered the father of modern business strategy, the answer is yes — create online courses, but not in a way that undermines the school’s existing strategy. * * * For Clayton Christensen, whose 1997 book, ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma,’ propelled him to academic stardom, the only way that market leaders like Harvard Business School survive ‘disruptive innovation’ is by disrupting their existing businesses themselves. The question: Should Harvard Business School enter the business of online education, and, if so, how?

“But Harvard Business School’s online education program is not cheap, simple, or open. It could be said that the school opted for the Porter theory. Called HBX, the program [in contrast to Harvard University’s ‘edX, an open-courseware platform that would hitch the overall university firmly to the MOOC bandwagon’] will make its debut on June 11 and has its own admissions office. Instead of attacking the school’s traditional MBA and executive education programs — which produced revenue of $108 million and $146 million in 2013 — it aims to create an entirely new segment of business education: the pre-MBA. ‘Instead of having two big product lines, we may be on the verge of inventing a third,’ said Prof Jay W Lorsch, who has taught at Harvard Business School since 1964. * * * warned Professor Christensen [said] he was not consulted about the project [and warned:] ‘What they’re doing [HBS’s online courses] is, in my language, a sustaining innovation,’ akin to Kodak introducing better film, circa 2005. ‘It’s not truly disruptive.’”

“Professor Christensen did something ‘truly disruptive’ in 2011, when he found himself in a room with a panoramic view of Boston Harbor. About to begin his lecture, he noticed something about the students before him. They were beautiful, he later recalled. Really beautiful. ‘Oh, we’re not students,’ one of them explained. ‘We’re models.’  They were there to look as if they were learning: to appear slightly puzzled when Professor Christensen introduced a complex concept, to nod when he clarified it, or to look fascinated if he grew a tad boring. The cameras in the classroom — actually, a rented space downtown — would capture it all for the real audience: roughly 130,000 business students at the University of Phoenix [NOT a HBS project, that is], which hired Professor Christensen to deliver lectures online.

“‘We’re [HBS’s] at the very high end of the market, and disruption always hits the high end last,’ said Professor Christensen, who recently predicted that half of the United States’ universities could face bankruptcy within 15 years.

Note:
(a) Harvard Business School’s “professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon [:] Competitive advantage. Disruptive innovation. The value chain. But when its dean, Nitin Nohria, faced the school’s biggest strategic decision since 1924 — the year it planned its campus and adopted the case-study method as its pedagogical cornerstone — he ran into an issue. Those professors, and those concepts, disagreed.”
(i) Harvard Business School (HBS; Established 1908)

In 1924 HBS moved away from Harvard Yard (in City of Cambridge), to the current (on Soldiers Field in City of Boston).
(ii) Nitin Nohria (born 1962 and raised in India; earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and earned a PhD in Management from MIT)
(iii) business school
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_school
(section 2 Notable firsts: 1819 – The world's first business school, ESCP Europe was founded in Paris, France/ 1881 – The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is the United States' first business school/ Harvard Business School was the first program in the world to offer the Master of Business Administration degree [in 1908, the year the School was established])
(iv) ESCP stands for Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris.
(A) École supérieure de commerce
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/École_supérieure_de_commerce
(ESC’ is a French business school at the university level)
(B) French English dictionary
* école (noun feminine; from Old French escole, from Vulgar Latin iscola, from Latin schola [from Greek scholē): “school”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/école

I knew it must have come from Greek, because “ch” is pronounced “k” in English.
* supérieure (adj): "feminine form of supérieur"
* supérieur (adj masculine): "superior, upper, senior, above, higher than"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/supérieu
(v) case study
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_study
(the case-study method was first introduced into social science by [a French] Frederic Le Play in 1829; When the Harvard Business School was started, the faculty quickly realized that there were no textbooks suitable to a graduate program in business. Their first solution to this problem was to interview leading practitioners of business and to write detailed accounts of what these managers were doing)
(A) The introduction of this Wiki page quoted

Gary Thomas, A Typology for the Case Study in Social Science Following a Review of Definition, Discourse, and Structure. Qualitative Inquiry, 17: 511-521 (2011).
qix.sagepub.com/content/17/6/511.abstract

Professor Thomas of University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
(B) Later the NYTimes article quotes HBS dean Nohria as saying, “We don’t do lectures.”  The article goes on explaining: “In the case method, concepts aren’t taught directly, but induced through student discussion of real-world business problems that professors guide with carefully chosen questions.”
(vi) Michael Porter(1947- ) coined "competitive advantage" (“which describes how companies choose to be lower cost or differentiated relative to rivals.” Wikipedia)

Compare
comparative advantage
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
(section 1 Origins of the theory: first mentioned in Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations; formulated by [an Englishman, a Jew of Portuguese origin ] David Ricardo)

usually applies to INTERNATIONAL trades.
(vii) Clayton M Christensen,  The Innovator’s Dilemma; When new technologies cause great firms to fail. Harvard Business Review Press. 1997.

Compare
Joseph Schumpeter is noted for "creative destruction."

choi

(continued)

(b) “That skunk works, in a low-slung building 300 yards from campus, is not little. It buzzes with 35 full-time staff members — Wharton’s online efforts, by comparison, employ one-half of one staffer, Mr [Karl] Ulrich[, vice dean for innovation at Wharton, part of the University of Pennsylvania,] said — who are scrambling to complete a proprietary platform that, after this summer’s limited go-round, could support much larger enrollments.”
(i) Skunk Works
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works
(The name "Skunk Works" was taken from the moonshine factory [to make alcoholic beverage] in the comic strip "Li'l Abner")
(ii)
(A) go-around (n; 1890–95;  noun use of verb phrase go around):
“1: an act or instance of going around something, as a circle, course, or traffic pattern, and returning to the starting point.
2: a series or pattern of occurrences; round <After the third go-around of questions, the witness was released>
3: run-around (def 1 ) .
Also, go-round (for defs 2 and 3).
Dictionary.com Unabridged; Based on the Random House Dictionary
dictionary.reference.com/browse/go-around

I’ll say def 2.
(B) go-around (n):
“(also go-round)
1 A flight path taken by an aircraft after an aborted approach to landing
2 North American • informal A confrontation or argument <we had some go-arounds>
3 North American • informal Each of several recurring opportunities”
www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/go-around