HBX: How Disruptive To Business Ed?

By choosing to enter this new field, Harvard Business School masterfully made another decision not to compete with what it already does exceptionally well: delivering a distinctive and world class MBA program and an enviable portfolio of executive education courses and seminars. There will be no cannibalization here and no risk of diminishing the stature of its current offerings by selling “lite” online versions of what it already offers on campus. If anything, this two-month long, part-time grounding in business will likely increase the appetite of HBX graduates to later enroll in a residential MBA or an exec ed program.

As Youngme Moon, senior associate dean and chair of the MBA program, puts it: “We began to think about how we could make a real difference. We have MBA and executive education so the space we began to narrow in on is undergraduates who lack the basic language of business. There is this very different segment of the population that would be interested in a business education. We looked at the content that we expect our MBAs to have before they show up on campus. It’s the fundamentals. “The world is divided into segments of people who have a hunger for business education,” adds Moon. “In everyone of those segments, we want to make a difference. We want to be a leader.”

And yet at the same time, Harvard is sending another message. It won’t give away its core product for free as many other schools have decided to do by jumping onto the MOOC bandwagon. HBS realizes that what its highly paid professors provide is a highly valuable resource. It’s worth money. Massive Open Online courses completed by only a fraction of the people who sign up for them is not a sustainable model for the Harvard Business School.

FREE MOOCS FROM HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL? FORGET IT

If you want to avail yourself of Harvard’s business expertise, you’ll have to compete for it by applying. You’ll have to pay for it and earn it, too. In this day of age, that seems almost quaint if not novel. But HBS is building a new educational business with HBX and it wants to make sure the venture is both sustainable and impactful. The inaugural $1,500 price tag for CORe will most certainly rise, along with the business school’s knowledge of the digital marketplace.

“MOOCs may be the right approach for other institutions,” says Bharat Anand, a strategy professor deeply involved in HBS’ online initiative as faculty chair. “Indeed, that’s what I take away from the study of media – that the debate over free versus paid as a ‘best practice’ is not really productive: ‘free’ has worked well for several organizations, and ‘paid’ for others. It just depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, and what your goals are. We’re adopting an approach that we believe is right for us.”

Though Harvard isn’t saying so, what it is doing could be lethally disruptive to its big brand rivals in another way. By gaining early access to the world’s best and brightest students, HBS is prospecting for the next generation of world class MBA students. The school will see who really shines in this two-month tryout of sorts, who captures the highest grades, and who smartly shows the right stuff in an online environment. It could then decide to offer invitations to the very best of those students to apply to its full-time MBA program later.

And then there are Harvard’s future plans which are likely to cause a bit more discomfort for rivals. A second set of offerings on the HBX platform–with a launch of late spring in 2014–will be a portfolio of classes on such topics as entrepreneurship and innovation, the microeconomics of competitiveness, and disruptive innovation, growth, and strategy. Harvard is bringing out its big guns for these: strategy guru Michael Porter, Mr. Disruption himself, Clay Christensen, and the school’s top professors in entrepreneurship, Bill Sahlman and Joe Lassiter. Christensen’s course requires four to five hours per week over four weeks, while the entrepreneurship course will initially be limited to Harvard undergrads, graduate students, and postdoctoral/clinical fellows.

As if that is not enough, during the summer of this year, HBS plans to open a virtual classroom that combines digital and physical elements and allows participants worldwide to interact with one another and a faculty member in the same way they would in a campus-based HBS class. In partnership with WGBH, the school has developed a state-of-the-art studio that it plans to use to engage with alumni and to “complement and enhance” its on-campus offerings, including HBS’ lucrative exec ed programs.

As they say in Silicon Valley, this could very well be a killer app.