MBA Program instructor David Sutherland’s courses are teaching students how to innovate within an organizational framework, and companies are reaping the benefits of partnering with Terry.
By Matt Waldman (AB ’96)
Innovation is a funny word. Add one-part success and two-parts hindsight, and this noun evokes the iconic imagery of the assembly line, interchangeable parts, and Henry Ford. Remove the success and retain the hindsight and a company risks creating a punch line. Bic succeeded with its line of pens, lighters, and razors, but the company’s line of disposable underwear for women generated more cackles than shekels.
Terry faculty member David Sutherland understands that the subject of innovation — when paired with touchy-feely, new age buzz phrases like “playful environments” — oftentimes results in sideways glances from senior managers. However, Sutherland’s idea of play really does work, and he has the goods for CEOs to follow him down the rabbit hole.
“I run into it all the time, but I’ve done this work for 25 years. I tell CEOs to give me one of their big strategic issues and some license to play with it,” says Sutherland, who will create a team, lead it through the innovation process, and convert the masses. “The ideas that teams deliver blow away CEOs, who admit they would never have had the same results sitting around a conference table.”
Finding new ways to help and improve existing companies is the essence of Sutherland’s three business innovations courses in the Terry MBA Program. And there is no shortage of organizations willing to give students meaningful projects.
The roster includes both local and international firms, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CNN, Equifax, Coca-Cola, 1,000 Faces Coffee, Caterpillar, Inc., Cisco Systems, and Toyota. The list includes repeat customers, who offer students internships — and jobs are typically not far behind.
The Innovation Management course shows students the lay of the land. It covers the tenets of the subject, who is good at it, why they’re good at it, and essential considerations for employees engaging their company to develop stronger innovation capability.
The mission is to equip students with the skills and knowledge to understand the current state of innovation within a work environment. From there, they can help a company become more innovative and generate more value from an idea or a process.
“Over the past 20 years companies have become very efficient at managing cost, but they’re not good at coming up with new creative ideas or choosing the right ideas to develop,” says Sutherland about firms’ mastery of internal quality and efficiency programs that are highly controlled with easy-to-spot problems, but lacking an external focus that generates growth. “There’s almost $2.3 trillion sitting inside U.S. corporate treasuries that is not being spent — more money than any time in history. Companies for a lot of reasons are not investing those dollars, and they are not taking the same risks that they may have taken in the past. To create growth in an economic system, you’ve got to invest.”
The Design Thinking course teaches students how to walk the talk with specific methods of observation, creation, prototyping, and implementation. Sutherland models the course process after components of Stanford University’s renowned design program. Students learn how to open an existing culture to new ideas while creating the proper physical environment that is flexible, inquisitive, playful, and risk-friendly.
“Companies are beginning to realize that instead of setting up goals to reshape their culture, they are setting up environments to support innovation and culture changes,” says Sutherland, citing studies in the fields of neuroscience and psychology — thanks to his burgeoning partnership with UGA’s Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development, which includes an interdisciplinary certificate program in creativity and innovation.
“The science is there to show that it works,” says Sutherland, who points to AT&T and Printpack as two companies that have set up innovation centers, zones, and spaces. The new environments are generating richer ideas and tools. “Companies are beginning to realize that if you change the behavior you change the culture, because culture is a reflection of behavior. We use a model with four behaviorally-based variables called the Operating State. When IBM transformed its culture, you can look to these four variables and see how they did it.”
The Innovation Projects Course is the capstone of the three-course sequence. MBAs take what they’ve learned and then develop an actionable business plan that meets the goals of the company while providing the students with real, hands-on experience. The students act as consultants, tackling live business problems for corporate, government, and nonprofit clientele and delivering actionable strategic plans on specific company projects. Each company comes to the course with a specific challenge — grappling with an emerging market, pursuing a new project, making branding decisions — and teams of MBA students tackle these challenges during the semester.
“The innovations courses help students understand how to develop an implementation strategy” says Sutherland, who notes that it’s more than just generating a good idea — especially a bold idea that has to connect to things that the client is already doing. “You have to have a very specific plan with roles and accountability with real individuals inside the company. Because of this focus, we find that so many of our clients implement what we come up with. It’s great.”
The course divides students into small multidisciplinary teams. Students spend half their time in the classroom, and the other half generating solutions for clients. Equifax has partnered with the Innovations course on three projects.
The first project resulted in the team developing an innovation process to identify initiatives for Equifax’s operations group. That led to a second project that examined Equifax’s methods of teaching new customers about a product or service. The most recent project was a big data engagement that vice president of operations Tom Latimer has labeled a success.
“The Terry students presented product recommendations that leverage Equifax’s strengths to the health care and automotive industries,” says Latimer, who describes how the MBA team met with internal teams across the Equifax organization to develop an ROI calculator.
“Our people can use it to identify the value that our data would bring to our customers. In the case of the automotive industry, it helps us have conversations with the dealers to help them forecast sales.”
“Companies like Equifax look at our projects course as a little microcosm where they can ask students to generate ideas for how to maximize their use of analytical tools and big data,” says Sutherland. “They throw it to students to work on and the students come back with ideas and an implementation plan. For the client it only requires them to spend an hour a week with the students.”
Latimer sees opportunities for students to turn these projects into careers with Equifax. It’s feedback that coincides with Sutherland’s vision.
“We want to give our MBA students the ability to walk into companies and say, ‘I’m not only good at analytics and finance . . . I’m also good at what it takes to come up with new ideas and develop those ideas to get them into the marketplace.’ When they see it on resumes, companies are gravitating towards students with this kind of skill set and orientation to business growth.”
For more information: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/terryuga/mba_innovations/#/4
