Call it happenstance. Maybe even serendipity.
But Perry Samson has another way to describe it. “It was a gift,” he said.
How else to explain the chance meeting between Samson, a professor at U-M, and Amy Gillett, vice president of WDI’s Education Initiative, at a January 2015 Ross School of Business summit on the future of education.
Samson had developed a new active learning platform for classrooms called LectureTools and wanted to explore if his new application would be useful in other countries. Among its features, LectureTools captures video of lectures, allows students to ask questions using their laptop during a professor’s presentation, and lets instructors pose questions in real time to gauge if students understand the material.
WDI and Gillett had longtime partner school – the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Latvia (SSE Riga) – whose leadership was receptive to new technology and innovation. And Gillett could deploy an MBA team from Ross to see if Samson’s tool would be a fit in Riga and other markets.
“I thought his tool could improve the quality and reach of management education there,” Gillett said of SSE Riga. “I immediately proposed the student team. They would be able to find out if this was appropriate technology for the school, if the faculty and students saw the value, and if so, what the benefits were and how LectureTools could best be adapted for the Latvian market, and by extension, other emerging markets.”
Samson, the Arthur Thurnau Professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences, as well as founder of LectureTools, loved the suggestion.
“The timing was excellent,” he said. “As a small company, we always try to identify better ways to do our work.”
In June 2015, four Evening MBA students from Ross traveled to Riga as part of the school’s Multidisciplinary Action Projects (MAP) program. MAP is an action-based learning course offered at Ross during which students tackle a real-world strategic project under the guidance of faculty advisors.
The students were tasked with conducting an assessment of the Latvian market for Echo 360, the active learning technology company that bought Samson’s LectureTools. They also developed a market entry strategy for Echo360’s growth into Latvia and other emerging markets.
The student team interviewed faculty, administrative staff, and students at SSE Riga. They conducted secondary research on the higher education technology field to better understand how technology is adopted at universities. They also looked at demographic trends within the Latvian higher education system.
“It was far beyond what Echo 360 could do,” Samson said.
He said the students were “remarkable, enthusiastic. They thought of a number of things I didn’t think of.
“They provided good insight on what drives adoption of technology in education and identified a number of suggested process changes,” Samson said.
Gillett said WDI’s Education Initiative works to improve the delivery of management education in emerging markets through a variety of ways. One way is to pair MAP teams with WDI partner on any number of projects.
“This is a great way for us to help our partners explore innovative ways to deliver management education for the 21st Century,” Gillett said. “WDI’s Education Initiative will take the learnings from this project and others like it and serve as a hub for how to make management education more efficient, effective, and accessible in the future.”
Gillett says the project was well received by the Ross students. “The students on the MAP team loved working on the project. There was a big demand to be part of the project.”
Allie Schachter was one of the student team members and said she enjoyed applying what she had learned in the classroom to a real-world business problem. (Watch a video of Schachter talking about the MAP project here.)
“My MAP experience solidified and contextualized many of the concepts discussed in class, which was an incomparable educational experience,” she said. “It was a great opportunity to work with a group on a very large and involved project. Throughout the course of our project, we honed our ability to work together, delegated tasks to one another, and navigated difficult conversations and challenges together.
“It was a really great opportunity to gain experience working for and with others. I will certainly carry those experiences forward when working with teams at work and in future classes.”
Samson said he too learned a lot and is grateful to Gillett and the student team.
“It was a wonderful interaction,” he said. “It was invigorating for me to sit down and have conversation with someone who is thinking more deeply about all these things.”
Aija Priede-Sietina is not the kind of businesswoman who fits into easy categories. The Latvian architect and mother of two is co-founder and general director of KUKUU, a small, family-owned company that crafts stylish baby furniture. Well schooled in designing and building things, Priede-Sietina, however, lacked formal business training.
“I had to learn this step-by-step,” she said. Running a company “was a big challenge…[but] you can never find out what you can do if you don’t really try.”
KUKUU was birthed from this can-do, adaptive spirit. As Aija and her designer husband Daneks Sietins raised their daughters, the couple saw a market for what she called “functionally designed, ecological, sustainable and matching furniture that is safe for children, and…actually nurtures a child’s personality.”
They launched KUKUU in 2011 and soon its bird&berry collection earned a Latvian Design Society Design Award, an A’Design Award (First Prize for the Best Manufactured Product), and international attention.
As a result of its newfound success, KUKUU faced the challenge of increased demand.
“I always had doubts about how large of stock to keep,” Aija said.
This led her to apply to the Supply Chain and Logistics Management program offered by WDI in partnership with the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (SSE Riga). Aija attended free of charge as a WDI Teeter Scholar, named in memory of Robert M. Teeter, an advisor to U.S. presidents from 1968-1992 and a WDI board member. Through the scholarship program, WDI awards 20 full-tuition scholarships annually to managers from small & medium-sized enterprises and NGOs in emerging markets to attend WDI Professional Education programs.
During the supply chain program, which took place at SSE Riga in late April, Aija and six other participants learned to see their organizations’ operations in a new way. They gained new tools for ensuring their organizations are lean, efficient, and ready to compete in today’s increasingly complex and globalized economy.
Aija gave high marks to the program’s practical casework and intimate size.
“We all had the opportunity to ask questions and to work with our business models and to have some opinions from other participants,” she said. “Now I have some formulas to use and am testing how it works.”
Course instructor Damian Beil, a WDI faculty affiliate, said that the program has plenty to offer even small companies like KUKUU.
“All businesses with a supply chain must manage inventory, capacity, and customer responsiveness to weather against uncertainty,” said Beil, who also is an associate professor at U-M’s Ross School of Business. “These challenges are fundamentally the same whether the business is small or large. Participants in the program get a lot of value from seeing this, and from hearing about others’ experiences at different firms.
“For a small firm, this can lead to great ideas about how to better work with large suppliers and customers.”
Aija said managers from companies big and small could benefit from the program. The skill sets offered in these training programs help companies like KUKUU face new challenges and reach new heights. KUKUU is now sold in 16 countries.
Aija said her experience as a start-up company “encourages people to do something, because we didn’t have this background in producing our products and selling around the world.”
“We took the risks,” she said. “We are moving forward. We see potential, and that keeps us going.”
Since 1992, WDI Executive Education has trained more than 15,000 managers from over 8,000 organizations in Central & Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, Russia, Latin America, Morocco, Rwanda, China and Vietnam. WDI’s partner institution SSE Riga is the top business school in Latvia and contributes to the economic and social development of the Baltic region.
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