Innovation in MBA

Posted by coffeyac on Friday, October 27, 2017 in Blog.

Hello Vanderbilt community!

This week I would like to write about innovation in my MBA. As mentioned in my last post, I am a second year student in the 2-year full-time program offered by the Owen Graduate School of Management. I am concentrating in Marketing and Strategy so most of my classes deal with traditional marketing and strategy topics (Pricing, Promotion, Distribution,..). However, last Mod (at Owen we do not have full semesters but two 8-week modules per semester), I decided that I wanted to explore some of the courses offered in entrepreneurship and innovation. Therefore I took a class called “New Product Development” with Pr. David Owens. Pr. Owens specializes in innovation and new product development and is the recipient of numerous teaching awards (by the way he is also part of the Wond’ry and he is always available to support students that want to discuss with him ideas that they may have).

During the 8-week class, we learned about different product innovation techniques like effective brainstorming, design thinking or the house of quality. We also had to team-up with other students to develop a product innovation. My team decided to work on a blender with a disposable mixing bowl targeting busy young professionals who do not have the time to clean after preparing a shake or a smoothie. At the end of the Mod, we had to prepare a presentation showing who is the target customer for the product, what are the needs of the customers and the features that are more important for this customer. We also had to do research in terms of the competition the future product would face in terms of quality, price, features and distribution among others. Finally, another interesting request for this final presentation was to create a “TV commercial” for the product so we recorded someone preparing a shake in a traditional blender while complaining about all the time and effort required to clean the bowl. Then someone would introduce the “Disposablend” that is a practical solution and that does not require the bowl to be cleaned. By the way, for all of you worried about the environmental implications of the disposable mixing bowls, we ensured that the product had to be 100% recyclable!

I hope you liked this entry and that it was a good way for you to learn about some of the innovation courses that are offered in an MBA program.

Jose Hurtado
Student Ambassador