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Weekly UpdatesExecutive Summary
A discontinuous innovation alters the social behavior of the adopters. In business and marketing education, such an innovation transforms the behavior of both faculty and students. This article examines the adoption of a discontinuous innovation, a purely experiential marketing course, in an MBA curriculum.
Our teaching innovation went through a three-stage adoption process, including initiation, integration, and diffusion. Currently, this experiential course, which is based on a simulation game, is taught as a core course in several master level programs in the business college, including an Executive MBA, a Global Executive MBA, an International MBA (IMBA), a Master of International Business (MIB), an overseas MIB, an overseas IMBA, and an overseas Executive MBA.
Our successful adoption of the discontinuous innovation can be attributed primarily to innovation partnerships and collaborative activities. We forged a close partnership with Innovative Learning Solutions Inc., a software developer, so that we could jointly devise a simulation game named Marketplace. We participated in its development in various capacities. Our partnering activities were focused on game development and testing, two successive stages of product innovation. Our participation in these activities was instrumental to the adoption of Marketplace in our programs.
The new teaching approach we adopted over the last decade addresses several limitations of the lecture-based method, and also provides a number of other benefits. We conducted an empirical study to examine whether students perceived these advantages. On the overall dimensions, the simulation course was seen as a better vehicle in helping students make career preparations, achieve educational goals, and utilize time. It was also advantageous in providing a high level of involvement and satisfaction.
Introduction
A discontinuous innovation alters the social behavior of the adopter (Christensen 1997). In business and marketing education, such an innovation transforms the behavior of both faculty and students. "The professor's role evolves from that of a knowledge fact provider to a knowledge theorist and manager" and the student changes from a passive knowledge acquirer to an active learner (Celsi and Wolfinbarger 2002, p. 69).
However, many technologies adopted in business colleges today are characterized as incremental or continuous innovations, in nature replacing old media to support the lecture-centered learning mode (Backhaus and Liff 2007). For example, PowerPoint and Corel Presentation, advancements from transparencies, are mostly used for content transfer, i.e., demonstrations of textbook materials. An electronic syllabus on the Internet is a virtual mirror of the paper brochure and handout in the classroom. Most Web-based classes, though more flexible because of their synchronous and asynchronous deliveries, are an extension of physical classrooms. While these innovations facilitate teaching, they do not fundamentally alter the cognitively passive learning style in lecture-based classes.
The objective of this article is to introduce the adoption of a discontinuous innovation, a purely experiential marketing strategy course, in an MBA curriculum. To achieve this goal, we first describe the simulation game selected as the experiential device, our innovative pedagogy, and a three-stage adoption process we went through. Then, based on a partnership perspective, we examine the contributing factors in the adoption process. In the next section, we present an empirical study to evaluate the effectiveness of the new pedagogy. The information in this study is based on more than a decade of successful experience of the faculty in the department of marketing at a large southeastern public university.
Teaching Innovation Adoption
Discontinuous Innovation
The discontinuous innovative technology we have adopted is Marketplace, a computer network-based program provided by Innovative Learning Solutions, Inc. (ILS). The program allows a class to simulate the inception of a global industry and its development through growth to early maturity. In the virtual business world, students establish their own companies, assume the role of executives, and make strategic decisions in new product development, customer and competitor analysis, market entry, advertising and sales management.
In our simulation course, the learning behavior of students is distinctive from that in a lecture-based class in several ways. First, students go through an experiential learning process (Ramocki 2007; Saunders 1997). They take on a prescribed role, interact with other participants in the virtual industry, and process knowledge in a situation characterized by a high level of active involvement. Second, they take part in a recursive decision process (Kunz and Pradhan 1992). In the simulated industry, students in each team make quarterly decisions, and their performance in the quarter is a function of their decisions interacting with those of all other participating teams. At the end of the course, each team's market position (e.g., sales, market share, profits, etc.) is the consequence of the cumulative decisions of all teams over the life of the industry. Third, it is an integrative cognitive process (Shaw, Fisher, and Southey 1999). In this class, knowledge in marketing strategy is learned and applied not in isolation but in conjunction with that in other business functional areas. For example, when students design a new product and its promotion campaigns, they need to simultaneously make and implement supportive decisions in manufacturing, accounting, finance, and distribution.
Adoption Process
The innovation adoption process is a sequence of stages through which a potential adopter passes in the acceptance (or rejection) of a new product, method, or service (Rogers 1995). With respect to organizational adoption, three main stages are identified: initiation, integration, and diffusion (Frambach and Schillewaert 2002).
As part of the initiation, we started teaching the simulation course using the Marketplace game in spring 1990. At that point the game was titled "The Market Place: A Strategic Marketing Simulation." It was tentatively offered to senior undergraduate marketing students as a special experimental class. Several features characterized the initiation. In regard to adoption decision mode, our experience fits the bottom-up approach in which an individual, often known as an innovation champion in one unit of the organization, takes the first step in the adoption process (Frambach and Schillewaert, 2002). One faculty member in the marketing department took the initiatives in making the adoption decision and teaching this new course with a motivation to improve the marketing strategy course. Cognitively, it was a learning period in which the instructor attempted to familiarize himself with the content of Marketplace and identify a match between the course material and its target students. As the instructor recalled: "Although the students were wildly enthusiastic about the class, I found the material rich and sophisticated enough to be graduate, rather than undergraduate matter." Pedagogically, the instructor was focused on developing a participation format to accommodate the early version of Marketplace. He described his efforts as challenging because "In this version of the game, teams were not vertically integrated; rather, half of the teams were manufacturers and the other half were distributors. As a consequence, a large fraction of the course involved negotiations between the groups, with alliances made and dissolved, contracts drawn up, and so forth."
In the Integration stage, the simulation course was accepted into the MBA curriculum in fall 1992. From 1992 to 1996, it became a core course offered to MBA students regularly both in spring and fall semesters, with a second faculty member joining the teaching team. The integration phase was marked by curriculum adaptation in which the instructors developed a full range of class activities to make Marketplace suitable for a semester course. For example, every week students were required to write a quarterly report analyzing sales, market demand, and competition. During the fifth week of the course, students spent the week preparing a business plan, presenting it to venture capitalists, and negotiating for equity investment. From the sixth to seventh week, they focused their attention on forming strategic alliances and negotiating for joint development of new products. These activities both enriched students' participation experience and allowed them to gain skills needed in the real business world.
Among the three stages of innovation adoption, diffusion is the last one, and it can be measured by an accumulated level of users. In the field of business education, diffusion refers to the expansion of an innovative teaching technology from a single program to multiple programs. In our case, at the end of 1996, the simulation course was a required core course only in our regular MBA program. From 1997 to 2004, it was adopted as a core course in several more master-level degree programs in the business college, including an Executive MBA, a Global Executive MBA, an International MBA (IMBA), a Master of International Business (MIB), an overseas MIB, an overseas IMBA, and an overseas Executive MBA. Meanwhile, the number of the faculty teaching the course increased to four.
Innovation Partnerships
Our successful adoption of the discontinuous innovation can be attributed primarily to innovation partnerships and collaborative activities between innovation adopters and technology providers. In the last decade, innovation in classrooms has fostered a wave of partnerships between adopting schools and technology vendors (Black 2002).
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