Organizations and Markets

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• 1. Chihmao Hsieh  |  20 January 2007 at 4:27 pm

  The capstone course that I instruct at the business school here at UMR (www.umr.edu) is pretty unique, in that the class breaks into teams of 4-8, and each team formulates a ‘business proposal’ in the first month of class, makes a real-life loan presentation to our local bank, whereupon financed teams operate their business for the rest of the semester, in the end liquidating all physical assets and retaining student rights to all intellectual property. AFAIK, there’s only one other b-school in the nation that carries out experiential learning to this extent (Okie State).

  At the beginning of this semester, I explained to them that workplace interruptions stemming from email, instant messaging, voice mail, and the like is costing business hundreds of billions of dollars annually (e.g. one estimate at $588 billion is cited within this article: http://www.slate.com/id/2138123/; I’ve seen other estimates closer to $450 billion)

  From an instructional standpoint, if only a student team could come up with a solution that addresses .01% of that cost, they’re still looking at a $60 million opportunity.

  Of course, from the research standpoint, all this talk about such a ‘cost’ is hard to swallow insofar that the term ‘cost’ here isn’t well-defined, and there is no statistic summarizing the value of innovations that pleasantly result from these interruptions.

• 2. Chihmao Hsieh  |  20 January 2007 at 4:30 pm

  (Pardon the interruption: Not Okie State, but the University of Oklahoma.)

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