Core Notes Program – High Level OverviewSales Meeting

August, 2011

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New Product Line: Core Notes Program Roll-Out

Largest Revenue Opportunity

Lowest HBP Market Share

Opportunity for HBP to launch core notes program in major disciplines for traditional MBA curriculum

Study of average MBA syllabus signaled interesting opportunity for HBP penetration of a new content area

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New Product Line: Core Notes Program Roll-Out

Potential for Disruption Strategic Advantages for HBP

• Opportunistic response to 2 phenomena Disaggregation efficiencies generated by

digital technology Increasing dissatisfaction with practices

and culture of leading textbook publishers

• Ability for faculty to dispense with multi-vendor supply line

• Opportunity for customers to source all pedagogical content from HBP

• Offering in digital format only avoids high costs of physical production, inventorying and shipping allowing for low price point relative to traditional textbooks

• Exploiting HBS’ unparalleled brand power and HBP’s access to HBS faculty

• New revenue stream for HE

• Increased revenues from established products Liberates sizable share of student course materials

budget Facilitates adoption of more HBP content (cases,

articles, sims)

• Fortifies HBP’s reputation as dependable source of high-quality teaching materials serving widest range of pedagogical needs

• Addresses growing market challenges posed by aging HBS technical note collection

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Primary Elements of the Core Notes Project

Ten Core Notes for the higher education market available for use for the fall semester

2012

The Notes will cover core conceptual material in Operations Management, at a level

typical of first year MBA courses at top business schools

The objective is to supplant the current use of textbooks and other conceptual

materials that business school faculty assign to complement cases in operations

management

The last critical element in the HBP family of learning objects for a typical

syllabus

Modular approach: Professors will be able to assign the full set of available Notes in

place of a text book, or just the individual Notes they need

“Micro-transactions”

 

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Product Policy – Core Notes

Length: Approximately 15,000 words, or 30 pages

Some Notes will be shorter or longer, as required by the content

Accompanying Teaching Guide will be approximately 3-5 pages

Content: Approximately twenty pages of the note will constitute essential reading

The remaining ten pages will be optional material that the professor can assign

depending on student ability, interest, time, etc.

The essential reading will be as generic as possible, applicable to any type of

organizational context and international in perspective

Probable topics for short pieces of optional material are: optional side topics related to

material, more advanced math that supports the math in essential reading, sample

problems applied to real organizations, recent research trends on the topic, recent

business innovations on the topic

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Product Policy (continued) – Core Notes

The accompanying Teaching Guide will recommend a few discussion questions for class, and

also HBS cases and simulations that reinforce the material

For each case and simulation listed, there will be a description of how it applies to the

material in the Note.

For each Note, there will also be an accompanying PowerPoint slide deck to use in class,

Length will be 3-5 slides

For each Note, there might also be one or several accompany calculator/tools

Tools will be very simple, individual-user based

Goal of tools is the build intuition behind the relationship between parameters in a

model discussed in the essential text.

Tools could be embedded in the text.

Pricing: tbd, but likely based on current pricing model for cases and HBR articles

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Next Steps in Product Development Work

Release market research survey

Analyze survey data

Finalize detailed outline of topical coverage

From analyzed data and discussions with HBS faculty, develop a draft topic outline for each

Note

Recruit faculty authors for the Notes in addition to “Uber-editor” for the core note series

Recruit peer reviewers, expert teaching panel, and beta testers

Select interior designer and create a design template

A lot of work in a short period of time!

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Tentative Note Topics

Introduction to Operations Management and Its Link to Strategy and Finance

Process Mapping and Analysis

Constraint Management and Capacity Planning

Quality Management

Lean Systems: JIT (for example)

Sources and Consequences of Variability

Inventory

Forecasting

Supply Chain Management

Innovation Management, Product and Process Design

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Link to Educational Technology

Development of six supporting “mini-simulations” in operations management Potential topics include: quality management, constraint management, process

mapping Look and feel very similar to the operations management mini-simulation highlighting

process variability (car wash mini-sim) Simulations will be authored by core note authors

Additional supporting educational technology in the form of calculators and tools Potential topics include: