Category Archives: Academically speaking

Practicing what you preach (The business school edition)

I am a board member of Masterstudies.com (prior description here) a startup company that offers a recruitment service for universities, primarily those offering master programs in business or related fields. The company now has a number of universities and business schools signed up, and we have begun to  learn something about the market that we (or, at least, I) did not know before, even though I have worked for a large, private business school for many years.

The thing is, it seems (many) business schools do not practice what they preach – i.e., many of them fail to apply some rather basic strategies, sales practices and web practices. Here are a few observations I have made so far:

1. Business schools say they differentiate, but they don’t

The classic. Porteresque view of competitive strategy says that there are only three generic strategies you can apply: Cost leadership, differentiation (i.e., being unique in some way), or segmentation (i.e., addressing specific sub-markets based on attributes of the customer). The latter, of course, is merely a more granular and partially combined version of the two first ones. Even though business schools should know competitive strategy well (it is, after all, one of their most important subjects), most of them do not pursue any one of these strategies. Or, rather, they say that they pursue a differentiation strategy but don’t. In that sense, they are neither strategic nor different.

The test for whether you have a strategy that truly is strategic is that you have chosen not to do something that you could have done. The test for whether you are differentiated is whether you can take away the school name (and things the school cannot change easily, such as nationality and location) from its description and then see whether you can determine which school it is based on its marketing material.

The reason I say this is that I have played around with the course and school descriptions found in our database, and been struck by how similar they look. Do the test yourself – go into the Masterstudies database, look up a few schools, and ask yourself: Which student segments are this school deliberately not trying to get – and what part of its offering is sufficiently different that you can see to what extent they are doing this in practice or just in Powerpoint.

Most of them are looking for the future leaders who see the challenges of  globalization, new technology and a constantly changing marketplace as opportunity to employ innovative strategies to build flexible learning companies that create value for their customers, shareholders and employees while displaying a sense of diversity and social responsibility. Hmmmm…. I wonder how large that segment really is – and to what extent the school really can serve this mythological student once he or she shows up?

The net result, of course, is a power law distribution of interest, with about 10 schools, the Harvards and Stanfords and MITs and Kelloggs of the world, getting all the attention; a near-first tier that is deadly afraid of doing something that the best schools do not, lest they be criticized for it; and a medium body and eventually long tail of schools that really do some differentiation but dare not talk about what it really consists of – for instance, explicitly targeting those who did not make it into the first tier schools but still are good students.

2. Business schools talk about market analysis, but many don’t do it well, or at all

Recruiting a student of sufficient quality and interest is a complicated process: You have to create enough awareness so you get enough applications so you can send out enough qualified to get enough accepts. To do this, you have to track

a) the number of leads (expressions of interests) you get

b) how many who actually send in an application (conversion rate)

c) how many of these are qualified and will get an offer (acceptance rate)

d) how many who accept the offer when they get it (yield)

My thoughts were that every Dean of Admission in the world eagerly tracked these numbers (they are, after all, also pretty good for measuring the level of effort of the sales team) but no, there are some indications that a number of schools, in fact, do not even know them. Depending on where in the distribution of schools you are, you ought to track different numbers: If you are top-ten, you track yield rate; if you are new, you track earlier in the process. (Incidentally, what Masterstudies offer is a filtered version of the first one, where schools can set up criteria for what kind of leads they want, thereby filtering out the clearly unqualified and enable some geographical or gender balancing – the difference between carpet-bombing and surgical strikes, as it were).

These numbers are not hard to get, but fewer schools than I thought actively manage them. (Not that I have formal statistics or would share them if I had them.).

Schools differ widely in their attitude to prospective students as well. We tested the response rate of schools and found that it varied widely – some schools did not respond at all, whereas some schools were on the phone with our prospective students in less than 30 minutes. That makes a difference as to whether the students will send in an application or not. (And no, there was no quality difference between these schools in terms of rankings and so on – we could not detect any pattern at all.)

3. Business schools know little about why they don’t get the students they want

There is a classical study by Abraham Wald of the location of bullet holes in bomb planes to find out where to add armor. Wald looked at where the airplanes were shot up and then concluded (not in the referenced paper, though) that more armor should be in the places with no bullet holes. The reason was simple enough: The planes that returned were the survivors, with bullet holes in places that could take the damage.

I wonder if not some of the same bias comes through with business schools. I wonder how many of them systematically interview or otherwise try to elicit responses from those students that did not chose their offering – at any point in the process. There are some schools that are clever – for instance, one school makes sure that the lack of a GMAT is not a hindrance to start studying if your grades and other academic performance indicators are good, by allowing the student to start and having time and resources set aside for GMAT certification. But I wonder how many take the time to find out whether it is lack of awareness, interest, timing, geography, content, structure, reputation or finance that makes promising student choose a different school. For those that interview candidates, I assume some of this comes out in discussions, but I have my doubts as to how well defined and executed these processes are.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that many students choose a business school for more mundane reasons that they tell school officials. It sounds better to say you chose this particular program because you like its specific focus on subjects or teaching philosophy (differentiation again – see point 1 above) than because the school is conveniently situated or your friends go there.

4. Business Schools make their web sites viewable, but not findable

Findability refers to the degree to which your web site or specific page can be found  by a search engine. As search technology more and more becomes the preferred interface to information, having a findable web site becomes very important. But more and more schools are finding that when you Google their specific master programs, the description of the the program found at Masterstudies.com comes up higher than their own description.

This is because schools spend a lot of money creating nice-looking web sites, but not much on making them findable. I think this is because the school has an understanding of how to create nice exclusive-looking brochures, but don’t know much about search engine optimization. The visual design of a site is outsourced to an ad agency, and the maintenance of it done through some content management package that does not use descriptive directory and file names, instead hiding new and interesting programs behind cryptic URLs. Perhaps each business school thinks their brand equity is so strong that students will know about them and come in the front door (i.e., the home page) like they used to do 10 years ago?

I have always wondered why business school web sites are done in such an overadministered and cumbersome fashion – for instance, few business schools set up ways for faculty to have blogs, instead requiring them to have official-looking web pages that are pain to maintain and leaving blogging to those who either set up their own blog outside school premises or have the technical gumption and political power to install the software on school infrastructure themselves. There are simple and cheap solutions around – Drupal, for instance – that allow descriptive directories and simple, shared content management. And when it comes to content – why not just use Movable Type or WordPress and the underlying software for faculty and other writers? In that way, the content would be plugged into what is beginning to look like the Semantic Web almost by default.

Conclusion

Given that I am on the Board of a company that tries to help business schools recruit internationally, I personally think this is just swell: Lots of business extension possibilities for us. But there is low-hanging fruit here: Simple, effective strategies and practices that business schools ought to execute on, with or without our help.

As marketing and recruiting increasingly goes on line (and, after that, into communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook), business schools will have to understand and change their marketing to make themselves much more differentiated and findable. In the meantime, there is room for first (or, rather, fast second) movers.

May your school be one of them.

Tim O’Reilly nails it on cloud computing

In this long and very interesting post, Tim O’Reilly divides cloud computing into three types: Utility, platform and end-user applications, and underscores that network effects rather than cost advantages will be what drives economics in this area. (This in contrast to the Economist’s piece this week, which places relatively little emphasis on this, instead talking about the simplification of corporate data centers – though the Economist piece is focused on corporate IT.)

Network effects happen when having new users on a platform or service are a benefit to the other users. This benefit can come from platform integration – for instance, if we both share the same service we can do things within that service that may not be possible between services, due to differences in implementation or lack of translating standards.

Another benefit comes when the shared service can leverage individual users’ activities. Google’s Gmail, for instance, has a wonderful spam filter, which is very reliable because it tracks millions of users’ selections on what is spam and what isn’t.

Tim focuses on the network effects of developers, which is an important reason why Microsoft, not Apple, won the microcomputer war. When Steve Ballmer jumped around shouting "developers, developers, developers", he was demonstrating a sound understanding of what made his business take off – and was willing to make a fool of himself to prove it.

Tim also invokes Clay Christensen’s "law of conservation of attractive profits", arguing that as software becomes commoditized, opportunities for profits will spring up in adjacent markets. In other words, someone (Jeff Bezos? Larry and Sergei?) need to start jumping up and down, shouting "mashupers, mashupers, mashupers" or perhaps "interactors, interactors, interactors" and, more importantly, provide a business model for those that build value-added services on top of the widely shared platforms and easily available applications they provide.

One way to do that could be to make available some of the data generated by user activities, which today most of these companies keep closely to themselves.  That will require balancing on a sharp edge between providing useful data, taking care of user privacy, and not giving away your profitability too much. As my colleague Øystein Fjeldstad and I wrote in an article a few years ago – the companies playing in this field will have to make some hard decisions between growing the pie and securing the biggest piece for themselves.

If we cannot harness network effects, cloud computing becomes a cost play, and after awhile about as interesting, in terms of technical evolution, as utilities are now. USA is behind Europe and Asia in mobile phone systems partially because US cellphone companies were late in developing advanced interconnect and roaming agreements, instead trying to herd customers into their own network. Let’s hope the cloud computing companies have learned something from this….

Computers + Biology = Virus Detector

This is the kind of read that makes you proud to be even remotely connected to computers, science and academia…..

Education and technology – a historic view

Nice review of Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz’s The Race between Education and Technology which goes into my ever-expanding pile of books to get. Main point: Income inequality decreased in the first half of the 1900s, then, after 1980, increased again. In chapter 8, available in PDF format, is the following conclusion:

Our central conclusion is that when it comes to changes in the wage structure and returns to skill, supply changes are critical, and education changes are by far the most important on the supply side. The fact was true in the early years of our period when the high school movement made Americans educated workers and in the post-World War II decades when high school graduates became college graduates. But the same is also true today when the slowdown in education at various levels is robbing America of the ability to grow strong together.

The maladjusted and marginalized terrorist

Bruce Schneier, security guru extraordinaire, has a cracking good article on what motivates terrorists in Wired: The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists, much of it drawn on a paper by Max Abrahms called What Terrorists Really Want.)

The main argument is that terrorists "turn to terrorism for social solidarity", i.e., that they join terror organizations less for political aims and more because they themselves are alienated and outcasts in search for belonging and, perhaps, as an outlet for violent or authoritarian tendencies. They are loners in search of meaning rather than radicals in search a way to express their political views:

Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group’s political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can’t describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren’t working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.

I think this makes lots of sense. During the late 60s and early 70s there was a vogue in many European countries for politically active youngsters to join the far left – a movement that at the most extreme produced the Bader-Meinhof group in Germany. Here in tiny and peaceful Norway a number of people who later wondered how they got into it joined various versions of marxist-leninist groups with the stated aim of violently overthrowing the state. (A great novel by the author Dag Solstad, later turned into a film, explores these mechanisms, telling the story of a small-town high school teacher who joins the movement because he falls in love with one of the leaders). This caused a number of bookish intellectuals from well-off homes to try to act and talk like "the people" (often with hilarious results) and take menial jobs with a view to start strikes, unrest and eventually, the great revolution.

The movement petered out eventually, due to a lack of examples of marxist-leninist success stories, better career opportunities elsewhere, the demands of family life and, most importantly, the failure of the general populace to join the cause. Today, most of these people (especially the ideological leaders) are found in relatively good positions in society and will not thank you for bringing up this period. (In one ironical twist, one of them is a professor of journalism – an interesting position for someone who once wanted to force the press to serve the needs of the proletarian dictatorship.)

Now, imagine what would have happened if the Norwegian state had declared war on these groups and instituted all kinds of controls in the name of national safety? Suddenly they would have increased in importance, had some legitimate cases of persecution (heavy-handed security always produces incidents) and play off the fear and irritation induced by surveillance and controls.

Instead, the Norwegian government largely ignored them, aside from discreet monitoring for weapons violations and espionage. To the extent that anyone was arrested, the perpetrators were charged with clear violations of current law and given sentences similar to those of anyone else.

The movement did not achieve much: A few strikes, a half-hearted rebellion at a few universities, a radical newspaper that still scrapes by (and occasionally is rather good, especially after they toned down the ideology,) "progressive" clothing fashions, some small groups of old professors with weird research streams, reams and streams of newspaper commentary, and that’s about it.

Now, imagine if the current war against terrorism had been pursued as a large-scale police investigation rather than a war, with terrorists being pulled into regular courts, security controls set up for security rather than show, publicity focused on a general toning down of the whole thing, money spent on improving the situation for various downtrodden groups, and military solutions employed as the absolutely last resort, and then only under the auspices of the UN.

I think al-Qaida would be reduced to a group of fringe Islamist fundamentalists with uncertain political aims, lots of fratricidal infighting (when the populace ignores them, they turn on each other), uncertain career paths and increasingly untenable positions. Which is what they were, until the Western world handed them prominence to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Bruce would, I think, agree. Here is his conclusion:

We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to the politically downtrodden, like unassimilated communities in Western countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communities and organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the social cohesion they need. And finally, we need to minimize collateral damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clamping down on bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social isolation, and the inevitable calls for revenge.

Innosuing, not innovating

image Endnote, owned by Thomson Reuters Reuters, is suing the main creator of Zotero, Dan Cohen (Or, rather, they are suing GMU, his university.) The reason is that Zotero includes a tool that can convert Endnote styles to Zotero (much like Openoffice has functionality for converting from MS-Word or other formats).

Now, there is a brilliant market move. Endnote is primarily used by academics. I have used it since around 1991, and for a couple of years I was a beta tester (and had the T-shirt to prove it.) Aside from the T-shirt, I got zilch for my efforts (and I did find a bug or two.) Neither did the thousands of academics who have created bibliography styles for various journals and uploaded them to Endnote’s web site.

I can’t think of a better way than a law suit to make people move to Zotero. This definitely does it for me – unless Thomson Reuters pulls this stupid suit. Come to think of it, we have a number of users at the Norwegian School of Management, I am sure I can persuade quite a few of them to switch sides…..

Suing an academic for creating software for other academics which draws on work of other academics when your primary market is academics? Have they hired hired lawyers from the music industry?

Zotero is a better tool, too. Shared lists, bibliographies, support for clipping from searches, including Google Scholar. Instant saves from browsing.

Time to move, methinks. Let me see, how hard would it be to migrate my 2100+ article database….

Update two hours later: Boingboing is on the case.

Update 10 hours later: Check out the Boingboing comments – Streisand effect in the making. John Mark Ockerbloom has a thoughtful piece on the suit.

Carlota Perez on how to understand global technology trends

image Carlota Perez: Global Technology Trends: Challenges to national strategies and policies

HBS 100th Anniversary

Soria Moria Hotel, Oslo

Only one of Schumpeter’s ideas accepted: Technical change is the driver of economic growth. But it is not totally random, it has continuities and discontinuities.

1970: Low cost microelectronics, sw, computers, internet, digital telecommunications….

1907: Mass production, low cost petroleum fuels, universal highways and electricity networks

Success may depend on anticipating the future, which you can do by looking at the past. There are powerful regularities and identifiable specificities in technological revolutions: Comes every 40 to 60 years, at the end of maturity of the previous technology, and has a similar sequence of diffusion in two periods of 20 to 30 years, with a financial crisis in between.

Tech revolution and techno-economic paradigms

Five revolutions: 1771 Industrial revolution, 1829: age of steam and coal, iron and railways. 1875 age of steel and heavy engineering (electrical, chemical, civil and naval); 1908 Age of the automobile: 1971 Age of the information technology and telecommunications. Next one may be biotech, bioelectronics, nanotech and new materials.

We are only halfway in the IT revolution. And each revolution takes about half a century to spread around the world.

Each revolution has a double nature: the create new industries that function as engines of growth, but there is also a new techno-economic paradigm. The first creates an explosive growth, the second modernizes and rejuvenates the mature industries.

The diffusion of each technological revolution confronts enormous resistance from institutions deeply adapted to the previous paradigm. Therefore, each technological propagates in two different periods: Installation and deployment. The first half sets up the infrastructure, usually with over-investment, but the infrastructure stays. It is a period of creative destruction, of unlearning, lead by financial capital, ends in a stock-market crash. The second is one of creative construction, led by production capital, applying the paradigm to innovate across all sectors and to spread the social benefits more widely – until maturity and exhaustion.

Why the bubble?

The capitalist economy is shaped by two different and functionally separate agents: Production capital (agent of accumulating wealth-making capacity) and financial capital (agent for reallocating and redistributing). Production capital has a long-term bias, financial capital has a short-term bias. Financial capital is better at massively redirecting resources and force new paradigm diffusion. Production capital is better for carrying growth and expansion within an established paradigm.

The role of the state changes: In installation period – the gilded age – the market does it all. In the deployment stage – the golden age – the state has an intelligent come-back, promoting long term growth.

Three investment paths for assuring long-term growth

Financial wealth and production wealth can both be destroyed, but for financial wealth you normally cannot influence it.

The best investment for the future is the capacity for technical change. Short-term, this means fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in the current paradigm. In the medium-term it means betting on the gestation of the next revolution. Insuring the long-term future means favoring open-ended science increasing the quality of human capital.

The current techno-economic paradigm shift is from the logic of cheap energy to the logic of abundant information. The new paradigm is still wrapped in the old, because cheap oil and cheap Asian labor favored stretching the old paradigm. But rising material and oil prices will lead to rising packaging and freight costs. Every little thing is wrapped in energy, such as cardboard or plastic. The visible effects of increasing global warming, with a rising climate risk (more Katrinas). There will be a change in the production, transport and distribution of tangible goods, leading to changes in business strategies and government policies.

The major transformations to expect (or to participate in): [lots of things], two being changes in lifestyle and urban planning towards activities and foot transportation.

Long-term funding: In the knowledge society, redistribution is not enough. Open-ended science works like a rich genetic pool. Investing in science, technology, education and entrepreneurship counteracts inflation by increasing average productivity. It is time to abandon market fundamentalism and agree ton a shared strategy to put order in finance and to collectively promote innovation to insure the future.

Brad Feld on history and future of computing

Good talk at MIT – the good stuff comes towards the end, where he starts to talk about the future. The rest is useful for my students….

IAD center opening

Monday was exciting – not only was it the Fall workshop for the iAD Center for Research-based Innovation, but it was also the opening of the iAD Lab [Norwegian language story here] – a physical manifestation of the Bjørn Olstad, CTO of FAST, opening the lab research project, as well as an important tool for drawing the researchers from the five Oslo-based participants (FAST, Accenture, Schibsted, UiO and BI) closer together.

Myself, I plan to spend at least one day per week in the lab – there is nothing like physical proximity to get to know an organization and a field, notwithstanding all the communications capabilities, electronic and otherwise, we surround ourselves with.

The lab itself, incidentally, is just six workspaces, a few computers and access cards for researchers. Gone are the days when the opening of a computing center was photogenic, with blinking lights and spinning tape decks. But it will enable us to store sensitive data in a secure environment, have enough horsepower to really analyze them, and provide a natural focal point for demonstrations, prototypes and experiments.

WSJ Cucumber season

George Will describes how beer was essential as a water purifier and human selection mechanism as the world urbanized and industrialized. This, of course, is different from Clay Shirky’s theory that rising alcohol consumption came because people had too much time on their hands and needed to burn off surplus synapses.

Personally I think it was the more mundane effect of lower unit cost due to more centralized production to serve a denser urban market, but who am I to spoil an interesting theory during cucumber season….

(Via Volokh. Who adds that wine, not beer, founded our civilization. I am tempted to quote Gandhi, who, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, replied that he thought it was a good idea.)

I need a beer. Need to feel more civilized….

A dose of tail reality

The long tail doesn’t work, according to Anita Eberle. Chris Anderson, rather sportingly, likes the article but begs to differ when it comes to determining how long that tail should be.

Maybe it is a tall tail?

Sort of simulated

This interesting article in the Economist shows how American politics is becoming increasingly polarized partially because when people move, they locate in areas with similar cultural preferences – be it granola or shotguns. When I lived in the States, I was always fascinated by the difference between Vermont (Birkenstock and yogurt country) and New Hampshire (main business: roadside hubcap emporiums). As it turns out, this split between liberal and conservative is happening all over the country, and you end up with the curious situation where the United States from the melting pot evolves into a salad, with rather few ingredients.

All this is interesting, but hardly relevant for technology, no? As a matter of fact, not: I am currently working on a research project with nGenera, called BST: Putting Business Simulation Technologies to Work. Simulation allows us to see the aggregate effect of many small decisions.

One of the early books showing the importance of this is Mitchell Resnick‘s Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams. In this book, Resnick demonstrates a number of simulations programmed in StarLogo (a parallel version of Logo, a programming language originally created for children.)

One simulation in particular (caveat: this is from memory, my numbers may be wrong here) is pertinent to the polarization of America: The effect of weak preferences on clustering. Resnick constructs a 100 x 100 matrix where each cell is inhabited by either a black or white dot. Each dot can “think” (i.e., have preferences) for itself, and the simple preference each dot has is the unless it is living in a neighborhood with at least two of its own kind (“neighborhood” defined as the 8 cells sharing a side its own cell) it will move, randomly, to somewhere else. Note that this is not a strong preference: A dot of one kind will happily inhabit a cell where 6 of its neighbors are different, as long as two are the same. (A more thorough description, with images, is here.)

In a surprisingly short time, the initially well distributed matrix transforms into clear clusters (even bands) of white or black. Importantly, this process, when viewed from a distance, seem to be conscious, yet the relatively mild preference exhibited by each individual dot seems rather harmless. It may be tempting to ascribe the segregation to some conscious plot, failed policy or other single cause. It is a very powerful demonstration of the aggregate and cumulative effect of small decisions and weak preferences – and simulation is the only way to make it apparent.

Resnick’s book shows similar uses of simulations to understand ant foraging strategies and traffic jam formation – and some of the insights have been put into use in real life. For instance, traffic lights at on-ramps that introduces cars into traffic flow in an even stream rather than random groups is, as far as I know, a direct result of simulations of traffic jam formation.

In science, business and politics, we are moving from isolating single factors and varying them to understanding interaction patterns between many small components. Simulation allows us to understand this – the challenge lies in understanding where and how this very powerful tool can give insights.

And there you have Vermont and New Hampshire, Virginia and Maryland: The results of weak preferences over time. Perhaps we could simulate some real political discussion at some point?

Open Mobile conference musings

Tomorrow I am giving a talk on disruptive technologies at the Open Nordic Conference, and how that theory applies to open standards and open source in the mobile technology industry. The audience is apparently very technical and I, quite frankly, do not think that open source plays that much of a role – apart from providing available functionality for innovators (mostly at the user interface/user service level) to build on.

The challenge in mobile technology (and in any consumer technology whose aim is to facilitate interaction) lies in establishing a platform for users and business to build on. Right now I am listening to Nick Vitalari analyze platform establishment and growth as part of the nGenera project PBG: Building a platform for business growth.

I am thinking about how platforms get established – and playing with words. It seems to me that the process can be described in terms of four words:

  • Problem (often personal): Somebody has an itch to scratch, something that can be fixed with software, so they do it. (This is what Eric Raymond considers to be the beginning of almost any open source project.)
  • Product (or service): The solution to the problem gets productized, either in a closed or open fashion, using standard or collaborative programming and development processes.
  • Platform: The solution expands both in scale (distribution) and scope (technologies it can run on, added services, links to other solutions) until it is less a solution in itself for others to build on, where customers and users get it less for itself than for the added functionality it provides.
  • Protocol: The platform becomes so open and ubiquitous that it is available everywhere, fading into the background in terms of user awareness. This can happen in many ways – it can expand to become all-encompassing (Google, for instance, maybe Facebook in certain communities, email certainly); it can be modularized with tools that pulverizes the proprietary value proposition (emulation, multiple clients (like Trillian in the chat space, cross-licensing); it can be regulated into a standard (AT&T with telephones, for instance); or it can be subsumed into an underlying functional layer (Microsoft’s embrace and extend strategy).

In the end, it will be forced into some form of openness.

Half-baked so far, but it’s a start.

The importance of failure and the value of photographic evidence

J. K. Rowling does a great commencement speech at Harvard.

Mass Digitization: Time to fund it properly

The always readable Dan Cohen discusses funding for digitization of public domain books. Hard not to agree – I think Harvard-Yale-Princeton (or, for that matter, Harvard alone) should just pony up the money and do it. The resulting archive would be a boon to humanities research and researchers all over the world, would yield immense dividends in the form of research and study activity for decades, and would give Harvard a signal project like that courseware project down the river, especially given the recent kvetching about the size of the Harvard endowment and the lack of visible largesse on the expense side.

Masterstudies at Hawaii

I have just (well, last Friday) come back from the AACSB conference in Hawaii. As previously noted, I am on the board of a small but quickly growing company called Masterstudies.com, and this was our first “in the flesh” meeting with customers and partners. I tagged along on the theory that since I am an academic, I probably know how to talk to academics as well.

I am no stranger to academic conferences, but attending it as a vendor, not a regular participant or speaker, was new to me. I usually walk through the vendor section of a conference with downcast eyes, trying to not be cornered and pitched to. It was very interesting to stand there and see other people trying to avoid you – as a result, I have resolved to be much nicer to salespeople from now on.

That being said, the conference was a resounding success for us as a company – we talked to more than 60 universities and many of the other vendors and conference partners came over to our booth to congratulate us on the high interest and many compliments we got for our product. And I found it rather fun to market something – especially when it turned out we had a service that addressed a real need for many of these universities.

Recruiting blues
The problem with recruiting students is selectivity and quality control – you want students that are both good (in the sense that they have good grades and other qualifications) and also are environmentally compatible (for lack of a better term) with the other students. The first criterion is pretty easy to test for – grades and GMAT scores provide good indicators. Ensuring a proper mix of students for a program is harder.

For the prospective students, finding a school can also be very hard, since few students (at least outside the US) know more than a few business schools’ names and nothing about their quality. The result is a power law of prestige: At the top (“the fat head”), you find a few extremely well known schools (such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Wharton, INSEAD, LBS and IMD) with thousands of extremely well qualified people applying and very few getting in. Harvard, for instance, tend to receive 10 times as many applications as they have spaces, and of those people applying at least half of the people are good enough to make it through the program, if they only got in. At the top, finding students is not the problem – selecting them is.

For the students, another problem is avoiding the very bottom of universities: The outright frauds and degree mills that will sell you a certificate for a fee and an overview of your “life experiences”. (See this list for some suspects, but they tend to pop up like mushrooms after a rainy night.) A degree from a very weak place is not something you want to attach to your CV at all.

Most schools and most students fall somewhere in the middle, though: Decent schools providing good programs, and reasonably smart students prepared to do the required work to obtain a degree.  Masterstudies.com provides a service here by maintaining a database of quality-controlled schools which prospective students can search without having to go to each school’s web site, and quickly submit requests for information to interesting schools.

Selective international recruiting
If this was all we did, we wouldn’t provide much value, however. Most students can search in Google for business schools, and listings abound. The problem for schools trying to recruit internationally is not that they don’t get responses when they advertise on the Internet – it is that they get hundreds or thousands of “leads” from people who clearly are not qualified to be admitted, either because they don’t have the background or the finances.

In certain countries, such as a large African country beginning with N, most of the requests for information have nothing to do with getting an education: Enterprising men request glossy business school brochures to show women, saying that they are applying to a prestigious school and thus are attractive partners. Given the cost of an information package, this is clearly not a service most schools would want to provide.

To avoid this, we have the students put in their characteristics (education, work experience, managerial experience, age, desired industry they want to work in, etc.) and then match them to schools where they have a chance of getting admitted. The schools can filter the incoming leads so that they only get students they want, doing things such as selectively market in certain countries – say, perhaps they have enough people from Northern Europe or India, but want more from China or Southern Europe. Since we track where the prospective students log in, we can filter based on geography as well.

It works surprisingly well, which is why I am willing to be on the board. It is also very cost-effective: We charge the industry standard price for a lead (i.e., a prospective student), but the lead is qualified, meaning that every reference that comes from us has passed the hurdles the schools have set up themselves. That means that information packets go out only to students that actually a) have the requisite quality, and b) are in target markets the school want to serve.

(Of course, since I have read Shapiro and Varian, we also have a Pro package, where schools can pay a little extra and get promoted on the front page and so on – perfect for that newly launched MBA with a special twist that you secretly worry filling up.) As we start to build up good logs (we have had more than 100,000 unique visitors and growing per month since the new site launched in January) we should also be able to provide some pretty good and detailed overall statistics. For my own research, I am thinking about doing text analysis on the language in the program descriptions, to see what the main differentiating strategies of the schools are.

Check it out for yourself – though if you are a school, you should probably contact Linus, our Irish CEO (a former professional racing biker),  or Bernt, our VP of Business Development (who tried to teach me to surf in Hawaii, with decidedly mixed results) to get a peek under the hood, at the statistics and filtering pages which allow schools to select carefully and measure the results of their marketing.

And now, back to our regular programming….

Should rich countries open up for fair trade?

Excellent stuff by Brad Delong on what happens when rich countries open up their economies – not much, and long term the effect is positive, especially when you realize that 1.3b Chinese (and 1.1b Indians) are a pretty powerful force of economic development that you want to tie into your own economy with as many and as unbreakable strings as possible. In the long run, we all benefit by trade.

If only politicians up here in the frigid north could understand that….. Here is the video directly:

Brad is an inspiration and a glorious example to academics everywhere – he really is out there, putting his thinking, teaching and publicizing online. Maybe the makers of Morning Coffee ought to include Brad’s Morning Coffee as a default choice.

iAD Master students wanted!

(This message is meant for students at the Norwegian School of Management, but I am posting it here for distribution – and if someone from another institution should be interested, by all means, get in touch.)

The Center for Technology Strategy is seeking M.Sc. students who are looking for interesting topics for their thesis, offering the opportunity to write their thesis under the iAD research project. This project is a joint project of FAST, Accenture, Schibsted and six universities, among them NSM. The purpose of NSM’s part of the project is to understand the business impact of search technologies and other new technologies for information access.

This opportunity is open to all Master students, at any specialty, and would involve finding a research topic connected to the iAD project. (See a list of proposed topics here, but feel free to come up with your own.) The topic definition will happen in collaboration with faculty from your M.Sc. specialty. Thesis advisor will be either your own faculty, one of the faculty associated with the iAD project (Espen Andersen, Ingunn Myrtveit, Erik Stensrud, Torger Reve), or possibly an advisor from FAST, Accenture or Schibsted, as appropriate.

We are planning an information meeting on

    April 2, at 0900-1030 at room C2-040, BI Nydalen

If you are interested, please send me an email so I can know how many will be there.

Updated March 25: A list of some suggested topics can be found here. 

Time to move the scientific process on the web

A fascinating paradox is that, for all the innovations around the web, and the fact that it was created to support a research community (CERN researchers around the world) and a research consumption model, the scientific method still operates largely as it did in the time of Newton. This presentation at MIT shows some of what needs to be done in order to fix that

I particularly liked John Wilbanks’ slide saying that we need to move from

  • old collaboration:
    • reading the canon on paper
    • querying single-access databases
    • human as mediator
    • artisanal tool manufacturing
    • tightly controlled distribution

to

  • new collaboration:
    • reading the canon with machines
    • integrating databases
    • computer as mediator
    • industrial tool manufacturing
    • standardized distribution

The time is more than ripe for just getting this done, lest academic research fall so far behind industrial and commercial research that it becomes completely irrelevant (it already has, in some fields). MIT understands it and will build the future. Many other universitites, especially in Europe, do not. I am sorry to say, but I think it is a generational problem as well.

(That being said, it is irritating to have to download Realplayer to see MIT’s videos. Real has this constant nagging to have you try out a "free trial version" rather than the truly free version, which you have to look hard for to locate.)

The scientific method

I am currently re-reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and came across this section, which is one of the best explanations of the scientific method I know of (explained in terms of motorcycle maintenance, of course). So, here goes:

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