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The Case: New Media Ventures, Inc. MBA 600 - Multimedia Applications in Business - Fall 2006 other pages welcome | course | syllabus | news | bistro | reports | roundtable | readings Port 80 Boardwalk's Popular Music this page New Media Ventures case Wisdom from previous groups | Outline for Your Plan deliverables | evaluation

Rather than structure the course around a textbook or a set of lectures, I'm structuring the course around a project. I've found it works better if everyone writes on the same general theme. Because you have access to some terrific software and to the Internet, I would like you to research the effects of the Internet on how people in organizations communicate. You will operationalize this as a business / marketing plan.

This is a good page to bookmark.

The links on this syllabus will take you on divergent paths. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.

The Working Manager (free reg req)

All the good stuff that you can get from courses and books - but for free, in your own time and at your own pace.

Background articles

These articles by Sean Carton will help you learn more about where I'm coming from with these projects.

A Quiet Revolution in Design
by Sean Carton
ClickZ, June 13, 2001

The nascent field of experience design comes from a realization that the Web is about a lot more than graphic identity. A Web site is the place where all the elements of a company -- graphic identity, customer service, products, services, and structure -- come together in one place. And interacting with a Web site conveys much more than the graphic brand identity of the company -- it's all about the experience of moving through the site and interacting with all of its various parts.

In many ways, the realization that Web design must incorporate what people do on the site (rather than simply how it looks) is a realization that Web design is much more like product design than print design. Products are made to be used.

The skills of information retrieval, analysis, evaluation, exchange, and presentation that you develop in MBA 600 are used throughout organizations. They are transferable skills; you can take them from the marketing department, to production, to finance, to personnel. Underlying these skills is the computer technology, knowledge of which is not only transferable. It's daunting if not downright scary.

Living The Web Lifestyle
by Sean Carton
ClickZ, August 18, 1999

"Technology is stuff that was invented after you were born."

Pedagogy in this course

Instead of this --->

We're going to do something more like kindergarten, scouts, and studio art:

Project Based Learning
The Buck Institute for Education

This teaching and learning model focuses on the central concepts and principles of a discipline, involves students in problem-solving and other meaningful tasks, allows students to work autonomously to construct their own learning, and culminates in realistic, student-generated products.

Overheard ...

"If my company doesn't change, we don’t have to manage change, right?"

New Media Ventures, Inc.

Let's Pretend

We've spent the last 50 years focusing on the "T" in IT. We'll spend the next 50 focusing on the "I".
--Peter Drucker

Note | The company profiled here is not a real company. It is being used for instructional purposes.

The Future of Media

You tell everyone that you are working for FOMI, the Future of Media, Inc., but within a year that name will be history. FOMI is a bogus corporate alias intended to provide badly needed cover.

You actually work for another company, New Media Ventures, Inc. This company is in what the investment community calls "stealth mode" -- the secretive early days before you release a prototype. You believe that a revealing name can give potential competitors vital clues about your plans.

To protect your company's privacy, you disclose the real name of the company to prospective employees only after multiple interviews. Whenever outsiders enter the office, a hush falls over your colleagues, a cloth falls over the whiteboards, and a keystroke starts everyone's screen saver.

Disclosing the real name of the company would tip off others to your plans, jeopardizing the "first-mover advantage" start-ups so jealously covet. That concern is especially acute in the Internet market. Unlike many other businesses, the barriers to entry for copycats are low.

FOMI has a big problem -- it is so new that, truth be known, it doesn't have any good ideas yet, let alone a product or service, to say nothing of a prototype.

However, FOMI's goal is very clear: to beat the media giants aka the five major record companies: Universal Music Group, EMI Recorded Music, Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and BMG. The latter two are partially merging for marketing purposes, so Big Four makes more sense. On the assumption that they are going to be too slow to adapt to the changes brought by the Internet, FOMI is going to get there first.

What will your new company do or sell? By media, you mean the whole range of intellectual property that can be digitized and delivered over a computer network, from movies to books to sports events to news. For starters, however, you are going to focus on popular music. Your product or service will help get pop music gets from musicians to listeners. Where in that process can you add value? Your scope for what you mean by "pop" is worldwide, as is your potential market.

Your Task

What's the best way to maximize the creative power of a group? FOMI is in the enviable position where it can develop more than one product or service. This is not a zero-sum game with one winner and multiple losers. In that position, then, FOMI wants to encourage divergent thinking. More ideas are better in this phase. In a later phase, the ideas can be combined, split up, split off, prioritized, and sequenced.

As one of a dozen deep thinkers for FOMI, your task is to take responsibility for one business and marketing plan. You will be the principal author. However, all along the way you will tell the others what you are doing, the specific products and services that you are planning to offer. You will share readings, and discussions. Your plan will be similar in many paragraphs to other plans. There is no stealing here, only sharing.

Gaps and contradictions are acceptable and indeed are often fertile ground for the next revision of your business plan.

Business planning is a process, not a product.

Goal | You will write a plausible business plan based on a rational (data-driven, clearly thought out) analysis of the pop music industry and especially the pressures put on it by the Internet.

Wisdom from previous FOMI groups

At the end of every MBA 604 class, I ask the group what they and I could have done differently now that they have been through the whole process.

Adjust to the process

This is an iterative, recursive process rather than a linear process. You don't do one part of this business plan and then leave it behind. You go over and over the whole thing like a jigsaw puzzle, filling it in, adding here and there, developing a small separate section that you aren't sure where it fits into the whole.

While the jigsaw analogy is useful, it is limited because it presumes one "correct" answer. The puzzle is finished when the picture on the table looks exactly like the picture on the boxtop. That's not true for this project because there is no boxtop.

Think outside the box(top)

The business ideas are too timid. Too traditional. Too incremental. Too rooted in the comfortable thought patterns of the old media world. They don't take advantage of the end-to-end, no-permission-needed nature of the Internet.

Think user-generated content. Think Web 2.0.

Decide on a product / service sooner

You can't make much progress until you make some basic decisions. You can modify them later, but you need to start somewhere, so don't wait.

Look harder for competitors

By the time you find them on the Internet, they have developed their business ideas usually to the point of at least first-round funding. Whether you use them as benchmarks or models, they are most helpful.

Focus on your customers sooner

I can't repeat it enough: your investors are not investing in the business idea you present as much as they are investing in your management team's ability to establish relationships with customers and to keep innovating in order to maintain those relationships.

Outline for Your Plan

What investors need to know to help them decide ...

There is no One Right Answer for what should be included in a business / marketing plan. The following outline tries to be inclusive and thus generalized. You will have to adapt it to your individual business model.

Do as much as you can with bullet-point lists. Develop paragraphs where they will help. Illustrations are good, tables, charts, graphs, and especially pictures.

If you ever go to a job interview and they ask, "Have you ever developed a business plan?", you can give them this one. Make it something you're proud of. Note that as long as it is on Ricci Street, it will be indexed by the search engines.

Summary

Having a great idea is not enough:

> articulate the value proposition
> identify a market segment
> define the structure of the firm's value chain
> estimate the cost structure and margin
> describe the position of the firm within the value network
> formulate the competitive strategy of the offering

To be noticed, you must boil your new ideas down to sound bites and then build them back up, from slogan to thirty-second commercial to three-minute elevator pitch to fifteen-minute presentation with snappy visuals. That's just to get someone's attention. Then you can have a meeting where you get serious.

Bistro topic on fundability.

Sources for plans

BPlans.com

SBA's Startup Basics

MOOT CORP Competition - international; $100,000 first prize

rules: each team will be given 15 minutes to present its business plan followed by a 20-minute question and answer session between the presenting team and the judges. THESE TIME LIMITS WILL BE STRICTLY ENFORCED.

read the winning plans

previous MBA 600/604 business plans - They set a high standard that I am sure you will exceed.

Marketing plans

Highland Capital Partners' Writing a Business Plan

The high points are who you are, what the customers' pain is, what you plan to do to relieve it, why your team is ideal for the job, where you are in the process of building your company, and how much capital you need.

The body of the plan should go into greater detail on the Big Four: Management, Market, Product, Finance. Provide the backgrounds of key management members with detailed resumes. Discuss the market need more than the market size. Explain how you know. Frequently, the most successful companies are started by frustrated customers. Intimate familiarity with the problem space, stemming from personal business experience, is the most convincing. The product discussion should explain the product and its benefits from a customer's perspective, not from the designer's.

Highland Capital Partners' Presenting to Venture Capitalists

A good venture capitalist is a partner and an advocate for the entrepreneur. We can help hire key people, land early customers, and provide useful advice at critical junctures. Ask us about our experience in your industry and explore the value that Highland can provide to your business. Become comfortable with how we operate, the amount of time we can commit to your business, and the availability and origins of our funding. Highland's investment in your company is the beginning of a relationship that can help your company to grow and succeed in the competitive marketplace. But like any successful relationship, it has to be built on a foundation of understanding and reasonable expectations.

The first meeting with a venture firm almost invariably lasts 1 1/2 hours. Your presentation should take 30 minutes maximum to deliver without questions. The rest of the meeting should consist of questions and discussion. The biggest mistake you can make is to try to force an overly detailed and lengthy slide show down an investor's throat. Begin the presentation by asking the participants what they would like emphasized. Bring key members of your team, but in no case more than four people. We will be trying to discern how well you can manage a company, managing a productive and timely meeting is a good indicator. Those management team members who are not speaking should listen attentively to the speaker as if this were their first time hearing the material - even if it's their thirtieth.

The presentation portion of the meeting should cover the Big Four: Management, Market, Product, Finance. Begin by giving the backgrounds of key management members, from birth. Discuss the market size quantitatively, but more importantly describe the customer need with compelling anecdotal information.

Assumption

The milk of disruptive innovation doesn't flow from cash cows.
-- David Isenberg

Rational failure

Most start-ups fail. I'm sure you know that, as well as why. Why do most start-ups fail? Because they're undercapitalized, that is, they don't have enough resources to get them to profitability.

You may not be aware that most successful corporations dissolve in a matter of decades if not years. Why? Because they are successful. They hire well-trained MBA's. They make good decisions for their shareholders' interests ... and the quarterly bottom line. They do everything right.

Have you seen the IBM TV commercial? The executive is telling his psychiatrist about his dream of being chased down a long hallway by a host of spectral, ghostly, skeletal creatures all wailing and moaning. They are his customers. They want, he tells the psychiatrist, "Everything, now." He asks the psychiatrist what it all means.

The psychiatrist tells the executive, "You're too slow. You can't respond. And you're in denial."

In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig writes:

This is not because a company is irrational or because it doesn't understand the nature of the market. The blindness that keeps the company fixed in a dying path is actually its clear understanding of probable returns. It sees real revenue from existing customers who need marginally better technology. It doesn't see the revenue from radically new technologies that depend upon unidentified or undeveloped markets. From its perspective, given its customers and reasonable expectations, these successful companies rationally fail.

FOMI is trying to anticipate this failure in the pop music industry and to prepare to enter the market with a strong business model.

As we go, we will have to understand better the industry we are going to enter. The Port 80 Boardwalk section of Ricci Street has an extensive and growing collection of materials to help: Popular Music - Where audiences meet musicians.

Deliverables

Summary of deliverables

Charge: create a business plan / revenue model / marketing plan for FOMI to reflect the new realities of the Internet.

As you can see on the syllabus, we are going to start off with some presentations by me on a third of the course's eighteen class nights. I'm making available a huge amount of what I hope is compelling reading, especially in the Popular Music web. I also hope to rely on Lawrence Lessig, Thomas Friedman, and others to make you think long and hard about how the internet is driving change in organizations.

During a couple of those nights as well as the other eleven class nights, you will make presentations on ebusiness software and ebusiness policy issues.

Your presentations will be supplemented by a web. Don't be fooled, it's the same old reading, writing, and speaking stuff with one difference: you'll be doing almost all but the speaking online.

Roundtable

At the Roundtable, you are going to analyze the pop music distribution industry by applying several common analytical tools. These analyses will be part of your business plan. They are due early in the course.

Presentations

After the first week of class, you're going to be giving several presentations. Most will be delivered from your seat, 5-minute distillations of your reading accompanied by a web page, preferably of your making. I intend that most of the research you do for these short presentations will be useful for your business and marketing plan.

Parts of your business plan can be assembled without discussion. Other parts deserve considered discussion and further careful thought. Each evening during the final third of the course, we will devote time to the parts of the business plan that need our attention. You will make four oral presentations to your classmates that I will videotape to make available for your marketing materials in MBA 604.

Your Web

On your Parkside Plaza web, I expect you to put several drafts of your business and marketing plan aka your final presentation. If it were printed out on 11-inch long sheets of paper, your plan would fill many "pages" and also be divided by headings and sub-headings within the text.

How will that work online? Will your plan be one long web page, one .htm file? Or will you chunk it up, probably by major headings? How will readers find their way around the chunks? What kind of navigation system will you provide to make it easier for them to understand your plan and spend less effort on understanding how to get around your web? Note the left-side expandable navigation system at BPlans.com.

You should be able to make webs (a group of linked web pages sharing a style sheet) combining images and text to replace a traditional ink-on-paper report as well as supplement your oral presentations.

The web is flexible enough that some of yours could record your exploration and discovery, that is, your research. It could be like much of Ricci Street, a simple list of annotated links to the sites you found most interesting and persuasive.

You could even start dressing them up a little. Look what Lisa Dominessey does on her Plaza web. Lisa's Round Roo business plan is formatted traditionally as one long "page". It's printable and plain. No images. I'd like to see you take it another step and format it as hypertext (several linked .htm files) and add images and other graphical elements. Look at what Tom Burns did differently for his final presentation about All Access.

Another of the students who just finished MBA 604 wrote in her self-assessment for MBA 600:

I think if I had relied on my web for more of my presentations, I would have felt more confident with my final prototype web in MBA 604.

The Final Presentation

On the final two class nights, you will present your business / marketing plan in the Lecture Hall. You will have the same amount of time that you would if you were a finalist in the MOOT CORP Competition ($100,000 first prize). I will videotape your presentation so that you and I can look at it later to discuss your presentation skills. Plan to spend most of your time on strategic thinking and effective writing, not webmaking.

All of you will take MBA 604 Marketing with New Media either directly following this course or next fall. Then, you will develop your web by targeting it toward potential investors and making a variety of marketing materials. For now, the business / marketing plan is sufficient.

===================

stuff from final 624

What will you make, sell, or do?

Task and COE videos on my laptop

"The Rules of Innovation" MIT Technology Review, June 2002

The Charthouse: Future, especially academic think tanks and corporate R&D

cooltown beliefs

The CoolTown research program in appliance computing is based on five underlying beliefs about the future:

1. Rampant diversity
2. The future network environment is the web
3. Everything has a web presence
4. Bridging the physical and online worlds
5. Connected ecosystems of service providers

SBA's Business Plan outline

CommerceNet and State of California's Next Generation Internet (NGI) Program

With the next generation of Internet technologies on the horizon, businesses must be equipped to take full advantage of the opportunities these advances present to thrive in tomorrow's eCommerce environment. It is critical that companies understand the potential impact of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) on business applications and business models in order to prepare and adapt to these changes. ...

The NGI Application Centers will house the development, testing, incubation and demonstration of new business and user-focused applications designed specifically to take advantage of the features and performance of the Next Generation Internet. The Centers will provide resources to small companies and individual researchers to develop new software and applications for the Next Generation Internet.

IBF Conferences*International Business Forum (note scrolling list of upcoming conferences)

Conferences on corporate finance, institutional investing, private equity, venture capital, corporate strategic investing and employee benefits. IBF Conferences*International Business Forum provides strategic information and key business contacts through its conferences allowing individuals and organizations to achieve their business objectives.

Who Says the Startup Is Dead?
by Scott Herhold
Business 2.0, April 2002

Young companies with a hot technology and a promising customer base still drive VCs wild. You could hear a lot more from these seven startups before they're through.

Even in this brutal venture capital drought, however, some companies still get VCs excited. Startups with the right mix of marketable technology, realistic business plan, and credible management are actually rising in value when they go back to investors. These days, that is a young company's ultimate endorsement. We've identified seven firms that meet that rigorous standard. They come from different niches -- biotech, consumer, and business technology products -- but they all share traits that VCs say are indispensable to success.

Most important, each firm boasts a tenable, marketable, and defensible technology, often protected by patents.

Beyond Wi-Fi
Atheros
Product: Wireless networking chips

The Web on Your Hip
Danger
Product: Mobile device

Biotech Plumbing
Fluidigm
Product: Drug discovery

The Portable Network
Neoteris
Product: Secure and cheap network access

Free the Data
Peribit
Product: Network traffic trimmer

Drug Research by Radar
Signature Bioscience
Product: Drug evaluation systems

A Tiny Giant in Storage
3ParData
Product: Servers

Intel has an interesting document (1.6 megabyte .pdf), especially toward the bottom with the images of the products.

Viscount Innovations -- Technology Strategy Consulting, Partnering, Incubation -- consultants in business intelligence emerging technologies in Toronto

The Top Ten Nanotech Products Of 2003
by Robert Paull
The Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report, December 29, 2003

===================

Evaluation

I try to engage each of you in an ongoing discussion of your learning. If you aren't getting enough feedback from me, ask for more. As you'll see, I'm big on formative feedback and Socratic questioning.

I expect you to participate in both our physical classroom and our digital classroom. At a minimum, you should:

follow all the links on the syllabus, especially those on the To Do (homework) lists and case page
maintain a web site at Parkside Plaza demonstrating basic webmaking skills
make half a dozen short in-class presentations and a final presentation supplemented by a business plan on your Parkside Plaza site.
post the Roundtable messages listed on the roundtable page

Your course grade will come from doing the minimum above, especially from your enthusiastic participation in the presentations that make up the bulk of the course.

It is especially important that you feel comfortable making presentations accompanied by web pages. Since most of you know PowerPoint, I'm not going to emphasize it. However, to be a top-notch MBA you need to know how to make web pages and use an image editor as well as you used to know PowerPoint, so I'm more interested in your webmaking.

Except for private email, all the work you do for this course will be publicly available, either in writing online or orally in class.

It will all be linked from the home page of your Parkside Plaza web, which I am encouraging you to develop into an online portfolio of your work. Because these skills build on one another, it is very important that you do the homework in a timely manner.

This is graduate school and this is a learn-by-doing course. There is no final exam or convergent skill set for you to master. Being there is crucial, so please try not to miss any classes. Let me know as far ahead as possible about absences so that your teammates can compensate.

"This course is all about mistakes" is a phrase I often hear in self-assessments from students who are voracious learners. The idea of mistakes makes some students very nervous. They want to know the One Right Way of doing things and they aren't into taking chances, especially in public!

If you are quiet in class and don't speak up because you don't feel comfortable speaking when you don't feel safe, that is, when you don't know everything about a topic and can't risk being contradicted, then your grade may well suffer. If you don't write much at the Bistro for the same aversion to risk-taking, then your grade may well suffer. If you are more comfortable with tests and examinations, this course will be difficult for you because there are no tests and examinations.

If I were using a rule-by-fear grading method, you could not afford to make "mistakes" because you'd have a lower grade as a result. I try to reward mistakes and my biggest enemy is your fear of being hit by a low grade. Putting it off and doing it all at the end in a mad rush or missing meetings or being shy in class or not writing much at the Bistro will not produce the learning you will need for other courses, especially MBA 604. Thus:

If you do the minimum above in a timely manner and make the presentations in class and attend all the meetings and express yourself orally and in writing, you'll get an A- for the course. That's what I expect most of you to get. Note that I don't mention how well you do them. Because your work is public, I expect that your personal pride will motivate you more than fear of a low grade. Nevertheless, I'm sure I'll get email after the course wondering why you got "only" an A-. I will reply to the email by directing you back to this web page.

If you do the work with flair and enthusiasm, you'll get an A, but that's exceptional. (I did not give any last mod.) Your boss could show the web pages or presentation to a client or to the big boss as is. Your contribution at the meetings was astonishing. Your boss would remember vividly and fondly when discussing a promotion. It does not matter that you deserve an A+ because you worked hard and are an all-around wonderful person. I don't doubt that for a moment, but it has nothing to do with this course grade.

If you don't do the minimum above in a timely manner or if you miss one of the presentations or meetings or you don't speak much in class or write much at the Bistro, you'll get no better than a B+ for the course. You will certainly be letting down your classmates as well as hindering your own learning.

If you miss two presentations or meetings or you don't speak much in class or write much at the Bistro, you should expect a B. We will need to talk about whether you have time for the course and are adequately prepared for MBA 604, which is tightly integrated with MBA 600.

Please note that a "lousy" presentation will get the same A- as one I personally "like". However, that doesn't mean I don't have standards and you don't have pride. Note the criteria below as well as my philosophy of learning and grading. In my experience teaching adults, the public display of all your work does more than fear of low grades to motivate you.

Rework Policy | The following three policies address rework, which is a big issue with process-oriented courses like this one.

1. Because of the progression of the case, the teams, and the tight syllabus, I don't know how and where to fit in a realistic make-up of your oral presentations. Instead, try to arrange a switch.

2. Your writing -- web pages and Roundtable messages -- can get revised as often as you want after the original due date.

In addition to these presentations, please note that you have one other very important requirement. You must email a self-assessment after you have done all the other work for the course. I will not turn in a grade for you until I get that email.

Criteria

While grades are useless at best and statistically bogus, I'm a big fan of feedback, assessment, evaluation: better now in class than later on the job and better from many sources than from one. I expect you to seek feedback from your classmates as well as from me. My evaluation of written and oral work asks four questions.

content Is it logical, insightful, and visually interesting?
structure Is it easy to follow and learn from?
language Is it designed, written, illustrated, and presented in an appropriate business tone?
mechanics Is it free of error and attractive to look at?

In short, does your work exhibit a command of business communications and its conventions, especially digital?

It comes down to this: If I were your boss, I would want to see documents, webs, and presentations that are attractive and accessible. Having your work available when I need it affects the quality component of my assessment. The quality of your work can be important at raise and promotion time.

These criteria are loaded with ambiguous and subjective terms: easy, appropriate, attractive, flair, enthusiasm. Such holistic characterizations come from observations colored by assumptions and prejudices. However, there are some generally agreed upon professional standards. We will discuss them in class and at the Bistro before your first presentation.

You also have the advantage of being able to look at what other students have done for this course. The Fall 2004 projects are linked from the Parkside Plaza welcome page.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
- Virginia Woolf