The first step in revamping the University of Rhode Island’s MBA program seemed obvious: move it to Providence. The school’s main campus in Kingston, administrators felt, was too far removed from the heart of Rhode Island’s business community.
The move also helped facilitate needed changes to the program that administrators hope make the school stand out in the crowded MBA marketplace. From their perspective, nothing set it apart from other schools.
It has been an accelerated, one-year program since 1995, which was somewhat unusual at the time. But many universities have shifted to one-year programs since then. As far as prospective students were concerned, URI offered “pretty much your vanilla daytime MBA program,” said Mark Higgins, dean, and Alfred J. Verrecchia and Hasbro Inc. leadership chair in Business at the College of Business.
The school was having trouble attracting both in-state and out-of-state students, Higgins said, and needed to make “truly innovative” changes. He and the faculty opted to “merge best practices” from other programs: experiential learning, working with real companies, drawing on local businesses and talent. Higgins said the faculty struck on a team-teaching approach independently.
The new version, which is finishing its first year, breaks down the traditionally segmented course of study and teaches each class across multiple disciplines. During the spring semester, students apply what they learn in small-team innovation projects at Providence companies. Now, this summer, 17 of the 19 students are finishing the program by working summer internships in the region.
The aim is to give students the practical skills they need to improve a workplace, rather than teaching the concepts alone. “It’s kind of book meets real world,” said Higgins, “and it’s been pretty successful.”
The new-look program begins in the classroom. But instead of semester-long courses in the individual topic areas – accounting, marketing and supply chain management, among others – students learn from a range of perspectives at once. A team of instructors, each with a different specialization, teaches two-week modules that take students through the six sigma process of strategic innovation. First, they learn how to identify a problem, then how to gather data on it and ultimately work their way to a solution.
Anthony Wheeler, the Spachman Professor of human resource management, who directs the program, said that sort of cross-platform thinking is what companies demand. “They’ve been telling us for a long time, ‘Look, if we want an accountant, we’ll hire an accountant. We want people who can put pieces together, who can solve problems.’ ”
The logical next step, then, became giving students real problems to solve. The school partnered with Fidelity Investments, protective technology maker G-Form LLC, and lottery and gaming company GTECH S.p.A. to create five innovation projects for teams of three to four students.
“It was fantastic,” said GTECH Senior Technology Architect Mark Truman. He spearheads the company’s university relations, including this year’s three project teams from URI. Truman says GTECH is implementing many of the students’ recommendations.
Two of the teams at GTECH and the one at Fidelity looked for ways to improve how the companies work. GTECH tasked students with streamlining their innovation and defect management systems, and the Fidelity group sought to improve firm’s quality program. The remaining teams, one at GTECH and the other at G-Form, created business plans for brand-new products.
Troy Gordon, a former U.S. Army captain who wanted an MBA to help launch his civilian career, said he enjoyed the experience of turning G-Form’s specialized technology into a new athletic cup. “For the most part the learning experience was kind of the doing experience,” Gordon said of the research and comprehensive business plan his group put together. “It was heavy on the execution of what we learned in the first semester.”
Parker Brown, the director of marketing and communications for G-Form, was impressed with the students’ business plan. He said the company is still deciding whether to put the project into action but will most likely use the marketing and financial part of the plan on other, related projects.
Truman of GTECH said despite some logistical trouble this first year, his company has already signed on to work with next year’s class. He called the program “a win-win” for the students and the business. “Our interest is not to try to get cheap work for hire out of them,” Truman said. “Our primary motivation is to try to give something back and give them an experience that will try to prepare them for their jobs when they come out of school.”
Students valued the work experience of the program as well.
Jonathan Gibson worked on the product team at GTECH and clicked well enough with the company to stay on as an intern. He now works on marketing for the IT department. Because of the interdisciplinary program and rigors of the spring-semester innovation project, Gibson said he feels “100 percent qualified to do anything within a business. The program taught us to be almost like a jack of all trades.”
Gordon echoed his classmate, explaining that at his Lifespan internship he feels completely comfortable in high-level meetings that would have intimidated him before. “I definitely think it will give me a leg up with my peers,” he said, adding that he is “cautiously optimistic” about his upcoming job search.
Gordon and Gibson, along with most of their class, will be looking for jobs once they complete their internships in early August. They will receive their diplomas at URI’s fall graduation ceremony in December.
The company representatives who worked with them say the newly-minted MBAs have reason to be optimistic. GTECH’s Truman said the kind of experiential learning URI now offers is exactly what students need to prepare for the workplace. If the right job were open, he said he would not hesitate to hire a graduate of URI’s program.
The next class of 24 students will start in September. •
