Integration and collaboration are indeed possible to learn in an environment where students are encouraged to connect the dots amongst the various disciplines and pieces of information and insight that they accumulate over terms and years. But we seem to have trouble setting up these types of environments for our students. There are always demands for core content — which totally makes sense because you need basic literacy to develop and advance in any body of knowledge.
So it was with great pleasure that I listened to presentations from some of the B.Comm. students in the d-studio last week. I heard a lot of dot connecting.
We were listening to several teams of two present their finding for Assignment 2 which involved observing a business at the UBC Student Union Building from a distance — ie from the public realm with no direct interaction with the business. They then used the canvas from the Business Model Generation book which is their text and recorded their observations. The next step was to identify insights about the business and any patterns or gaps that were evident. So it was in this discussion where we collectively heard teams connecting value proposition to revenue stream to customer segments — and thus what they had learned about accounting, marketing, finance and human resources.
We also talked a bit about blogs — it has been a slow start to the blogging exercise. Assignment 1 is called Blog Wrap — it isn’t due until the end of the term but it suggests that a weekly blog is essential to a successful blog wrap. I explained why I enjoyed blogging — the discipline of it, the way of recording thoughts and insights, and a sense of synthesizing activities and approaches. In the process, I ran into this cartoon:
The next project builds on the Business Model Canvas analysis.
In your same teams of two, using the business you are now intimately familiar with from Assignment 2, imagine that the business owner has approached you and said:
We/I want to re-think our business model – we know that the economic context has changed and we are keen to think differently about how we can improve our bottom line as well as provide a better, higher quality product or service.
You have already analyzed the business using the business canvas. It is now time to get serious about transforming their existing business model or reinventing a new one.
This is an exercise in generating and evaluating ideas — I hope they have fun. I am envious that they get to work on reinventing a business. Next week (week 5) we’re going to do the Design Thinker in class. Seems like a good time to step back and re-look at the process.