February 2009
Four Days + Four Nights = Six Businesses
Prof. Karl Ulrich's fast-paced Wharton West workshop enables new learning and a real venture
For many busy people, it can be hard to find time for things like getting a haircut or an oil change much less making the calls to schedule those appointments.
However, an online personal concierge could take care of that problem by arranging all types of necessary services. The Web site would sort the services by location, price, availability, and reviews. Think Opentable.com, but for all parts of your life.
That's how second-year West Coast executive MBA student Chi Nguyen describes her business concept, which was selected by her classmates as one of the top six ideas in a recent Wharton workshop-based course on the "Development of Web-Based Services." So far, it's not just her peers that like the idea. A lot of the people who viewed a prototype Web site provided positive feedback, saying they would use this type of service every day. (View all six finalist prototypes at http://www.wwwharton.com/)
For Nguyen, who is launching her own Web services company, the intensive four-day course at Wharton West in San Francisco was timely and relevant. The first assignment, before the workshop even began, was to submit potential business ideas for feedback from fellow students. "I basically broke up my actual business into several different parts and submitted each part as a concept idea," she says, noting that the subsequent feedback was very valuable.
Brendan Ederle, a full-time second-year Wharton MBA student whose idea related to online charitable giving also made it to the top six, explains that feedback was an important part of the tournament structure of the workshop. "You could tell the course would be unique right off the bat. We had to submit ideas online to our peers who would order and rank them. This was a unique segue into the interactivity of the workshop," he says.
On the first day of the workshop, developed and taught by Wharton Prof. Karl Ulrich, students voted on the quality of pitches presented, indicating which opportunities they deemed the most promising. As a result of the vote, about half of the ideas were eliminated. The process was repeated every day until only the top six ideas remained. Students whose ideas were eliminated joined the teams working on the remaining ideas. The culminating project for each of the final six teams was to build a prototype Web site to obtain additional insights about the ideas from people outside of the workshop.
"A lot of entrepreneurs keep their ideas very secret, but one of the most important things is getting feedback right away," says Nguyen. "Even with a 60-second pitch, you can still get feedback that helps you refine how you think about your concept. A lot of people building a business don't think about financing the business as well as attracting customers and this workshop helped you think about both. By doing the pitches in an elimination round every day, it forces you to crystallize your concept very quickly."
In addition to practicing the art of the pitch and obtaining feedback, the workshop also focused on topics related to building a Web-based service. Students heard from guest speakers such as Erik Blachford, CEO of Terrapass.com, and Trip Adler, CEO and cofounder of Scribd.com.
Prof. Ulrich says that in the course of teaching product design and development for 20 years, he realized he also had developed a lot of Web-based services and products. "I thought it would be very interesting to take the ideas of development from more conventional engineered goods and apply them to Web-based products and services," he says.
His goal for the students was to gain access to specific knowledge, tools and methods that would help them in this area, but also to have an "enabling experience" where they achieve success doing something they didn't know they could do before. "In this case, I asked them to develop a new Web-based product or service in the course of just a few days and if they had success in doing that, then they would be enabled to do that in their professional lives. What they ended up with were very representative Web sites that clearly communicated the product concepts. I was quite pleasantly surprised at how good the technology was at the end of the day."
As for the four-day format at Wharton West, Ulrich explains that "the intensive nature adds to the experience for topics like this where you don't need as much time for the concepts to gel, but rather you need to get momentum to build on your own project." He adds that the location was a great setting for the workshop, as much of the innovation in the area of Web-based products and services is happening within blocks of Wharton West.
Another unique aspect of the workshop was that it combined not only Wharton EMBA students from both coasts, but also full-time MBA students. Ederle says that the mix of students made it a richer experience. "With more diversity in the backgrounds and interests of people in the room, that yielded stronger ideas with broader appeal," he says.
Nguyen agrees. "Just putting so many smart people in a room and having them play devil's advocate and say, 'This business model wouldn't work,' or 'Have you ever thought about adding this to your Web site?' was helpful. It's unlikely that you'd get another occasion to get that many smart people to pick apart your business concept and give you valuable advice."
Wharton West second-year executive MBA student Christiaan Schaeffer, who runs a consulting firm, says that although his own ideas didn't get very far in the tournament, he learned a lot in the workshop. "We saw how there are no new ideas. When we researched the ideas we came up with, it turned out that many had already been tried in one form or another, but we also learned that it's not the ideas so much as the execution. If others had done their homework right then you would have heard about the idea already."
Nguyen adds that they also learned about creative and inexpensive ways to start a business. "For example, you can use a tournament style Web site to hold a contest that pays $300 to the person who designs the best logo for your business. All of these people around the world submit designs and whoever you pick wins the money. There are similar sites for finding programmers to build your Web site. You can pay a few hundred dollars just to get yourself up and going."
She notes that the workshop has already helped her current venture by providing opportunities to practice her pitch in the context of other good ideas, to learn how to make herself standout, and to find affordable resources to build her business.
"This was a fantastic experience and probably one of my favorite classes I've taken at Wharton. Prof. Ulrich is incredibly knowledgeable and the concepts that he has taught for so many years for physical products are very applicable to the Web," says Nguyen.
Ederle adds that the concepts are also applicable to more traditional fields outside of entrepreneurship. "Applying creativity, working on a team and seeking feedback throughout the process allows you to bring something in an idea phase to the implementation phase. The workshop gave me a new foundation for a different way of problem solving and I can apply that anywhere," he says.
Posted February 2009