By Cynthia K. Buccini
Michael Lande is giving his sales pitch to a critical audience. He and his team have a new product for little kids: a cookie dunker kit. It’s got a plastic cookie holder for dunking and a ceramic mug and plate, complete with acrylic paints for artistic kids to design their own cup. But the group members aren’t trying to raise capital to get a new product line going. They’re School of Management juniors making a class presentation to a lecture hall full of students and professors. The dunker avoids messy spills, encourages children to drink milk, and is a cool party activity, says Lande (SMG’08). Plus, he notes, “It alleviates the mush at the bottom of the cup.”
Soon he and his teammates are fending off a barrage of questions about things like markup percentage, target marketing, and the product’s defect rate. And then there are questions about the paint. Jeffrey Allen, an SMG assistant professor of information systems, gets to the point: “It’s acrylic paint, so doesn’t that mean it’s not washable? If you’re looking at a three-year-old age group, and it’s something that won’t come out of clothing — no way.”
Two other teams take their turns presenting new products and face a similar grilling. The session is meant to give the students feedback on their project, a big part of their final grade for the SMG course The Cross Functional Core, or Core for short. A requirement for all SMG juniors, the Core consists of four classes — marketing, operations, information systems, and finance — and the New Product Project, which enables students to apply what they are learning in the course. They work in teams throughout the semester developing a product and a start-up business.
“This is the class that students have heard about since day one of freshman year,” says Jonathan Hibbard, an assistant professor of marketing and Core course coordinator. “They come into it with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. The overall goal is to give them the skill sets that any student would get from finance, marketing, operations, and information systems, so they understand all the basics. We do the project so they have a much better idea of all the interconnections among them.” It’s worth 30 percent of their grade, too — “pretty much a class on its own.”
Students are placed in teams of seven or eight on the first day of class. Over the next week or two, they generate ideas for products, make presentations, and come away with an approved concept. Then they have to answer myriad questions: What are the benefits of the product? Who are the potential customers? How much will those customers pay? How will they manufacture the product? How do they plan to make a profit?
The teams talk to scores of people, including suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors, conduct focus groups and surveys, and write a 100-page business plan. Midway through the semester, they present their product in a business development workshop.
On this Friday in February, six teams are giving their pitch. One product features a six-by-four-inch LCD screen that clamps onto a guitar and teaches budding musicians how to play by displaying song lyrics, chords, and proper finger positions. Music instruction software to be uploaded from a computer is included. “This takes pieces from instructional books, DVDs, software, and live lessons and combines them into one easy-
to-use, interactive device for beginning guitar players,” says Andrew Westling (SMG’08).
He says the original idea, installing lights on the neck of the guitar to show finger placement, came from a friend who plays in a band. “I asked him, ‘If you could invent anything to make anything in your life easier, what would it be?’” Westling recalls. “And he said, ‘You know, it would be really cool if you could learn the guitar by looking at the lights.’” The team liked the idea, but there was a problem. “We would have had to get into real thin fiber optics, which are too delicate for playing the guitar,” he says. So they had to quickly come up with a redesign.
Developing such a complex product has been a struggle, Westling says, “but it’s led to some great ideas and innovations, so it’s a great learning experience.”
Other students agree. “I think it just gives us good, real-world experience,” says Samuel Kang (SMG’08). “We do presentations every day,” adds Kay Takeshina (SMG’08), “so we get more comfortable speaking.”
Meyer Rabinovitz (SMG’07) likes the teamwork. “There are problems and you learn how to solve them,” he says. “And you learn how to deal with people. It’s not as simple as you think. It prepares you really well.”
Eventually, the faculty will choose the top projects, from which three finalists will be picked by McGraw-Hill Irwin executives. Next March, those finalists will present their products in the SMG/McGraw-Hill Irwin Challenge. Last year, the winners received $100 iTunes gift certificates and other prizes.
Hibbard says the integration of the classes and the project makes the Core unique. “As far as we know,” he says, “there’s no one else who is combining four core courses and the project and has had success in doing it for such a long time.”
