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| Opportunity
Assessment: A Tonic for Jump-starting Sloan-C Creativity Stephen Schiffman, John Bourne and Janet Moore |
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Sloan-C members have many ideas about how to make courses better, deliver better student services, create infrastructure for online courses and degrees, serve new populations of learners, make students happier while they learn more online in better teaching environments, drive down costs of online learning, and a host of innovative ideas. As an organization, how do we make sense of the continuous stream of ideas Sloan-C generates and take advantage of these ideas? One technique is called Opportunity Assessment (OA). OA is a well-developed part of entrepreneurship, taught at most colleges of business in the US. This opinion piece advances the concept that Sloan-C can useventrepreneurial theories to advance e-learning more vigorously and effectively in the upcoming years. |
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"An opportunity is not
just an idea, but an idea that has
been filtered and shaped through a business situational lens." |
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Professor Steven Spinelli, director of the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College, tells his students not to come to him with business ideas. He says to come to him with business opportunities. There is a difference. Spinelli, one of the founders of Jiffy Lube, teaches that an opportunity is not just an idea, but an idea that has been filtered and shaped through a business situational lens. Sloan-C wants to think about how to turn ideas about online learning into opportunities. So what does the opportunity lens look like? How would one begin to filter an idea? A basic technique taught at Babson, a top-ranked program in entrepreneurship, is the "3M" method. The three M's are: market demand, market structure, and margin analysis. First consider market demand. What is the trend and capacity of the market into which your idea will fit? Are you trying to sell into a growing or shrinking market for your product or service? A course on how to create online courses may be a great idea, but has the market for such a course collapsed, as more and more faculty use online course tools such as Blackboard or WebCT? Is the "window of opportunity" still open? |
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structure. Is it realistic that you will be able to reach your customers? Who controls access? Are there a few major players or is the market fragmented with many players? Related to market structure is the concept of "unfair advantage". What specific attributes or abilities do you have that others don't have that will enable you to compete in the market? For example, do you have a hold on geography or a client list? Do you have unique expertise, a license or a patent? Or might you have an online course taught by a luminary in the field at your institution?
Finally, margin analysis is a fiscal plan for developing and delivering your product at a profit. More precisely, you must sell at a price that lets you recoup your initial investment as well as cover all ongoing costs. The difference in price and cost is called the margin, and this margin will determine how much you must be able to sell just to break even. What relevance do the 3Ms, and opportunity assessment in general, have for online education? In "Higher Ed, Inc.: The Rise of the For-Profit University" Richard S. Ruch maintains that most colleges and universities now see themselves as market-driven institutions, even though there is significant difference in the way for-profit and not-for-profit institutions account for their finances. Not-for-profits, according to Ruch, talk about "excess revenues" instead of profits; but either way, all organizations rely on revenue in excess of cost to sustain growth. Furthermore, Ruch points out that the market is a "powerful source of information about real social and economic need," a fact accepted and used by business people. No matter what position you take on calling students customers with regard to their attainment of learning objectives, at the macro level of shaping an idea into a viable opportunity, considering students as market customers lets you invoke the machinery of entrepreneurial thinking. So the next time you or a colleague comes up with an idea for a new course, seminar series, curriculum, or programs (products, all!) ask these questions: Why would anyone buy it? Why would they buy it from you? Would enough buy it so that you can offer it in a sustainable way? Is your idea a real opportunity? What can Sloan-C do next to develop opportunities for online learning? Please let us know by contacting john.bourne@sloan-c.org if you would be interested in joining a Sloan-C online forum for discussing opportunities in online learning. . . .the Sloan-C Team |
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