Which U.S. Business Schools Have The Highest Enrollment Rate?
Just before the end of the calendar year, U.S. News & World Report unveiled a list of the 10 business schools with the highest enrollment rates in the United States. The list is part of the publication’s ongoing ‘The U.S. News Short List’ series.
MIT Sloan Alum Startups Innovate In Fintech
MIT Sloan recently published an article by Kara Baskin how three fintech companies with MIT ties are disrupting traditional borrowing models for “credit cards, cars and education.”
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MIT Sloan Lecturer Talks Digital Disruption and Future Monopolies
MIT Sloan recently published an article that rounds up the insights Constellation Research founder, principal analyst and chairman R “Ray” Wang imparted at the Innovative Leadership Series to students “looking to take on—and take over—an industry.”
Wang has had a front-row seat to the “digital disruption of the last decade” as he’s helped his big-name clients “navigate digital transformation.” According to Wang, “More than half of Fortune 500 companies lost money last year while more than half of the companies on the list since 2000 are gone—merged, acquired, bankrupt, or off the list.”
Wang suggests that the reason many companies fail has to do with a focus on “operational efficiency.” Fortune 500 companies, Wang argues, should be asking themselves the tough existential questions related to their mission and business model to help them “figure out the products, the services, the insights, the experiences and outcomes.”
The second major piece of advice Wang offered related to the benefits of data. Simply put: “Data leads to information that can be shared with customers for a fee, in an effort to provide a better service. And it doesn’t cost a lot of money to implement.”
Wang pointed to the successes of “matchmakers” like Etsy and TaskRabbit, which reduce friction and distance between customers and service providers, as evidence that the increasingly streamlined connections between consumers and large companies has and will continue to make middlemen obsolete. “Nobody wants a middleman, unless that middleman is adding value.”
Wang cites Amazon’s “unbeatable” all-in-one “content, network, and technology platform” as one he believes companies across all industries will attempt to copy. But the bigger question is how to partner with—or absorb—other organizations to build “the next set of vertically-integrated monopolies.”
Sloan Prof Presents More Complex Housing Collapse Narrative
The MIT Sloan School of Business recently published an article that examines the role of middle-class borrowers in the 2008 housing collapse.
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Best Boston Entrepreneurship MBAs
Climbing the corporate ladder has gone the way of the Dodo. There’s genuine concern that employees no longer have faith investing their prime years in large corporations that bankrupted, decimated retirement plans and left the economy in shambles back in 2008.
Sloan Director Talks Sweet Spot of Product Platforms
MIT Sloan School of Management recently published an article that conveniently breaks down what it takes to make product platforms succeed, often by “matchmaking” and sharing assets across different offerings. There are assorted challenges associated with developing the necessary assets to launch successful product platforms. MIT’s System Architecture lab director Bruce Cameron, who teaches a course on managing product platforms, puts it simply: “Platforms take a lot of work to get right.”
He explainss that “most companies fail to achieve return on investment on their platform investments” but successful product platforms have the potential to “grow revenue and enter niche markets.”
Take BMW for instance, which reused “gear boxes and other parts across models” and re-purposed the extra cash to “develop 30 percent more vehicle models without substantially growing its engineering workforce.”
Cameron explains that one advantage to a software company—to use another example—opting to reuse part of its code in 10 places is a “reduction in risk,” which will in turn generate a “higher-quality software product across the board.”
Platforms that opt to reduce their risk are faced with a double-edged sword. Cameron cites Volkswagen’s decision to install the same 2.0 liter diesel engine across multiple vehicle models, which saved significant money in the short-term. But it was discovered that the German manufacturer illegally tampered with its own internal software, suppressing the real fuel emissions of its diesel engine cars. The result may end up costing the company billions in settlement costs just in the U.S.
“The idea that this is an engineering or procurement or manufacturing initiative is flawed,” he says.
There are four common pitfalls, according to Cameron: “Forcing platform development down into one product, neglecting to articulate the value of shared benefits, evaluating returns prematurely and attempting to move to platforms without undertaking the necessary underlying organizational changes.”
Cameron says stable product platforms that offer consumer customization options often prevail. The trick is hit that “sweet spot,” like a uniform-sized home appliance available in different colors.
