The Lions and the Hawks: Using Videoconferencing and Web
Technology
to Deliver a Cross-Campus New Product Innovation Course
John Lord, Professor of Food Marketing, Saint Joseph's University
Al Labonis, Instructional Designer, Saint Joseph's University
Lamartine Hood, Professor of Agricultural Sciences, The Pennsylvania State
University
Spiro Stefanou, Professor of Agricultural Economics, The Pennsylvania State
University
Financial support was provided by grants from ADEC and the USDA Challenge Grant
program.
Introduction
This paper describes the development of an educational partnership between two
disparate and geographically separated institutions - Penn State University (PSU)
and Saint Joseph's University (SJU) - that is specifically focused on the food
industry and, more specifically, the development and launch of new food
products. This partnership features a new product development (NPD) and
innovation management course that links the students and faculty of PSU and SJU
for the purpose of leveraging the respective competencies and specialties of the
two institutions: food science and agribusiness at Penn State and food marketing
at Saint Joseph's. We will discuss how this unique partnership began, what we
hoped and hope to accomplish, how the parameters have evolved, the educational
and information technology used to support our joint efforts, what we have
learned about both educational partnerships and technology during three years of
working together, and next steps for the future.
Background
Organizations in today's business world increasingly rely on outsourcing,
partnerships and strategic alliances across a wide range of business processes
and activities. Much of this is fueled by a belief in the strategic management
theory of core competencies. This theory holds that organizations learn to
perform a set of activities or processes very well and that a firm's strategy
should be based on leveraging these competencies. Adherence to this theory leads
to narrowing the scope of activities performed by all but the largest and most
diversified firms, giving rise to the need for substantial outsourcing and the
growth of partnerships and alliances between organizations with complementary
competencies. Similarly, educational institutions possess different competencies
or skill sets, and this, along with increasing financial pressures, has led
schools and colleges to seek educational partners.
Saint Joseph's University is a small (3400 full time undergraduate students),
private, comprehensive Catholic university located in Philadelphia. Saint
Joseph's is one of 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the U.S. In 1960, when
Saint Joseph's was a much smaller (1800 students, all male) college, some
leaders of the retail food industry in Philadelphia created a plan to found an
Academy of Food Marketing, designed to offer professional education to young
people in order to prepare them for management careers in food retailing. The
Academy, through a combination of circumstances, became part of Saint Joseph's
College, and began offering an undergraduate major in food marketing in 1962. It
should be noted that the angle that "sold" Saint Joseph's on the
Academy was that of addressing problems of world hunger, consistent with the
social mission of the Jesuits. While that remains a real concern, the primary
emphasis of the food marketing program at Saint Joe's is to educate
undergraduate and graduate students and to serve the food industry.
Over the past forty years, the food marketing major has expanded its scope to
the food supply chain "from farm to table" and has become the largest
major (with 350 enrolled students) on campus. Saint Joseph's University has
become known for its food marketing program, which has received tremendous
support from the food industry. The business school is named for Erivan Haub,
owner and CEO of Tengelmann, one of the largest food retailers in Europe, and
majority owner of the A&P food chain in the U.S. The USDA awarded Saint
Joseph's a grant of over $12 million to establish a Center for Food Marketing.
The activities of the Academy of Food Marketing are funded solely by grants and
gifts from the food industry. As a result of both USDA and private funding, a
new business school facility was built to meet the needs of students in the 21st
century. The new building was designed to incorporate the latest technology.
Mandeville Hall, which opened in September 1999, has enabled student to have
access to global resources and to interact with colleagues and subject matter
experts from around the world.
The College of Agricultural Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University,
through the Departments of Food Science and Agricultural Economics and Rural
Sociology, offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs in food science and
in agribusiness. As a land grant institution, Penn State has distinctive
competences in agricultural research and education as well as a very
distinguished track record in the food science and technology areas. Penn
State's Food Science program is considered a leader in the field and its
specialty courses in ice cream and chocolate processing are recognized as the
best in the industry.
During the mid-1990's, a group of Penn State faculty members, from both the food
science and agribusiness areas, created a cross-disciplinary new food product
innovation course, taught primarily to undergraduates, which drew students from
food science and agribusiness, as well as occasionally other majors. This
elective course was team-taught in a non-traditional way, without formal
lectures, using case pedagogy and a student food product development project as
major learning vehicles and featuring the team approach to NPD. The course took
the perspective and emphasized the food science and business aspects of the
product innovation process.
Meanwhile, Saint Joseph's has offered a required senior level course in new food
product development for over 20 years, with an emphasis on the marketing side of
NPD, particularly the areas of market analysis and product launch strategies. As
part of an attempt to create a dialogue between the St. Joe's and Penn State
food programs, faculty had an opportunity to meet and discuss the respective
courses. We (Lam Hood, Spiro Stefanou and Barry Zoumas at Penn State and John
Lord at Saint Joseph's) concluded that the approaches used at the two schools
were complementary, and decided that a prime opportunity for an institutional
linkage existed. So, starting in fall 1998, the two NPD courses have been linked
so that SJU students can take advantage of the Penn State competences in food
science and agribusiness while PSU students can learn much about getting their
new product to market successfully.
Rationale and Objectives
The rationale for the partnership is simply stated: two faculties with
complementary skills provide potentially more learning opportunities for
students. New product development in the food industry involves both technical
and business-marketing issues and decisions. In the real world, food companies
combine people from a variety of disciplines, including sensory analysis,
packaging, legal, production, engineering, finance, marketing, research, and
sales, to complete the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of activities required to
successfully launch new products.
Previously, the Saint Joseph's course had "assumed away" the various
technical and production challenges, and allowed students to concentrate
primarily on opportunity analysis, ideation, consumer testing, and creation of
both consumer and trade launch programs, without having to consider issues such
as, "is this product technically feasible?" As a result, students
created products with compelling consumer benefits. However, in numerous cases,
these products could not have been produced. On the other hand, while the Penn
State course was very strong on the business and technical sides, there was less
recognition and understanding of the launch process, that is, the process of
"selling in" the product to the retail grocery trade and to the
household or foodservice customer. This is a very significant issue - if a new
product is not "on the shelf," it cannot sell. Similarly, if a food
company does not build awareness, trial and repeat purchase, even a technically
sound product is bound to fail.
The faculty envisioned several key objectives for the partnership. The first was
to put food science, agribusiness and food marketing students together in a
situation where each cohort could gain an appreciation of the issues and
principles guiding the other, closely replicating what had to happen in the
"real" world. The second objective involved the use of project teams,
and the enhancement of students' understanding of team processes and ability to
work productively in teams. Teams, of course, are of critical importance not
just in NPD, but also throughout the business world, as team building and
teamwork are two of the skills that virtually every employer seeks. Teams are
heavily used in business education generally so project teams are not
particularly unique. However, the reality of having to work in teams with
geographically distant team members is unique to education, but increasingly
important to business.
The faculty team also identified the improvement of presentation skills as a key
objective of the course, and secondarily the ability to be comfortable making a
professional presentation in a distance-learning environment. The other
significant course objective was to give students exposure to and practice in
communication technologies - videoconferences, audio conferences, email, chat
rooms, threaded discussions - that are becoming increasingly important to
organizations.
Chronology
Initial meetings among the faculty were held during the spring and summer of
1998 to identify the best path to take. We had an ultimate goal - to create one
joint course for two different (in terms of institution, location, and
discipline) student cohorts. We were, however, initially careful to avoid being
overly aggressive; it was clear that "we had to walk before we could
run." As it turned out, we had to crawl before we could walk. Our first
step was to schedule the respective courses in order to have a common time slot,
a task that proved to be a little tricky since the academic calendar as well as
daily class times differs between PSU and SJU. So we had to do a little bit of
creative scheduling, but managed to find a weekly time slot lasting about 1 hour
and 40 minutes long (out of 150 class minutes at SJU and 115 at PSU) that
overlapped.
Year 1 - Fall, 1998
Both schools had already set up and were using distance education, at least on a
small scale, so videoconferencing facilities were available at both campuses. We
discovered very quickly that it was necessary to have an engineer at both sites
during the class to connect the two campuses via videoconference and to
troubleshoot any problems as they developed. In addition the engineers
controlled all of the technology required in the classroom during the
presentations. The Instructional Designers at the respective campuses instructed
faculty, guest presenters and students on how to use the technology in an
effective and instructional manner. The Instructional Designers also offered
suggestions to faculty, students and guest presenters when incorporating
technology.
We decided that during the first semester of the partnership, we could
"share" food industry resources, that is, each faculty enlisted some
volunteers from the food industry to do guest lectures on campus on a variety of
topics pertinent to new food product development, so the simple idea was to let
the Penn State students observe the Saint Joseph's presentations and vice versa.
This was fairly easy to arrange and all guest presentations were held during the
"common time" using videoconferencing to link the two classes. So for
the first time, Penn State students were exposed to in-depth presentations on
the marketing aspects of NPD and the Saint Joe's students gained some insight
into food science and agribusiness issues. During the first year (fall semester
1998) we attempted to use WebCT (hosted at Penn State) to make course
information available to students. There were many issues that prevented us from
going forward with using WebCT, and we wound up changing platforms for year 2.
We faced critical issues early on. The languages of the two disciplines are
significantly different and that, as a result, students had some trouble
grasping concepts contained in presentations from the "other"
discipline. Students took a very passive approach to the guest presenters. Also,
students were both unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable with the
videoconference environment. As a result, there was a distinct and somewhat
disconcerting lack of student participation. Students needed to learn how to
interact in this environment and to understand that the technology will
sometimes be a distraction. In addition, we needed to force students into a role
that would encourage them to be a participant.
We asked speakers to send PowerPoint presentations a few days before scheduled
presentations so that the slides could be available to students ahead of time on
the course website. In addition, we asked speakers to break their presentations
into sections with natural breaks so that students could be engaged and required
to listen more actively. Requiring students to ask the presenter questions
pertinent to their projects helped to make students more accountable. We also
attempted to present the speakers in a logical order, consistent with the
"flow" of the product development process, so that the topic sequence
was more logical for the students and easier to follow.
Both student sections of the course used a new product development project as a
key vehicle to apply learning; during fall 1998, these projects ran concurrently
but separately between the two classes. At the conclusion of the semester, the
winning teams from each campus made project presentations to a panel of judges
that was split between Philadelphia and State College. Students were required to
present their final project to their class at their campus as well as to the
class at the other location via videoconference. Students needed to practice how
to communicate to a local audience and at the same time present to an audience
at a remote location.
The faculty required the student teams to use PowerPoint as a presentation
vehicle. As expected, the Penn State team did an excellent job with technical
and business issues but put relatively little emphasis on product launch.
Moreover, the Penn State students did not cover ideation; instead, students were
assigned a new product idea. On the other hand, the Saint Joseph's team
developed a creative product with solid packaging and compelling advertising,
and did an excellent job with the retail sell-in, but wound up creating a
product (a beer flavored with liqueur targeted to women) that was neither legal
nor technically feasible. While this outcome was not surprising, it clearly
demonstrated that we had to take the partnership to the next level.
Year 2 - Fall, 1999
For our second go-round in the fall semester of 1999, we retained all elements
of the previous year's partnership with several changes and additions. First, we
adopted CourseInfo 4.0 from Blackboard as the web-based software for the course.
CourseInfo allowed us to post all announcements and documents, including the
course expectations and syllabus, staff information, student information,
faculty presentations and notes, project guidelines and materials, and speakers'
presentations, on the web. CourseInfo also provided communication capabilities
for individual, group or class email messages, plus chat rooms and threaded
discussions. We segregated course information by developing separate folders in
Blackboard for SJU and PSU. Students were encouraged to use the diverse
information supplied from both campuses. What we discovered was students did not
investigate any material outside of their required area of study. In addition
the course structure during this time did not encourage students to communicate
with each other after class hours.
Our second major change for year two was that we doubled the number of
cross-institutional industry presentations. Most weeks we featured a guest
speaker at one campus or the other, presenting via videoconference. Also, early
in the semester we scheduled a half-day at the Hershey Technical Center in
Hershey, PA to allow the students from both schools to meet and engage in some
team-building and bonding, plus to hear a presentation by a Hershey Foods VP on
new product development at Hershey Foods.
We formed "quasi-teams" that linked a Saint Joe's student project team
to a Penn State team, and mandated that these teams consult on each other's
projects: the Penn State students offered technical and business advice and
guidance and the Saint Joseph's students provided help with the marketing and
product launch. Students communicated using several different media. Some of the
overlapping class time was set aside for student teams to hold on-line meetings
using videoconference or audio conference. Students could also communicate
on-line or off-line using the facilities of CourseInfo.
The biggest change for 1999, however, was the completion of a new business
facility at Saint Joseph's University - Mandeville Hall, funded primarily by
USDA and gifts from the food industry. Mandeville Hall features state-of-the-art
technology, including videoconferencing and audio conferencing facilities, as
well as multimedia presentation capabilities in all classrooms and conference
rooms. This facility significantly expanded our communication and presentation
capabilities.
Following a request from our Penn State colleagues, we also decided to include
two other universities (Monterrey Tech, Mexico and Texas A&M) in our
videoconferences. We ultimately discovered that with the available technology
four-way videoconferences were unrealistic. The communication link needed for
four way videoconferences compromised the quality of the transmission between
Penn State and Saint Joseph's.
Year 3 - Fall, 2000
Besides adopting an upgrade of CourseInfo, to version 5.0, the major leap
forward was to create a true multidisciplinary, cross-campus course with a
common syllabus and cross-institutional project teams. This took student
interaction between the two campuses to a significantly higher level. We wound
up, ultimately, with four project teams, each comprised of 3-4 SJU (food
marketing) students and 2 PSU (food science and agribusiness) students. The
project expectations were jointly decided by the faculty and were identical for
both student cohorts. Each team was assigned a food company, did some
preliminary market and consumer analysis to identify a new product opportunity,
created a new product idea, and executed (or simulated) all of the activities
involved from concept development through launch.
Teams met in person twice at the Hershey Technical Center; some joint class time
was set aside for student meetings at a distance; and students used email, chat
rooms, and additional audio and videoconferences to get together and execute
their project. Each of the four faculty members served as a mentor/facilitator
for a team. The teams made two preliminary presentations during the semester, a
presentation of their business plan to the faculty, simulating a food company
management committee, and a final "sell-in" presentation to two
supermarket buyers at the conclusion of the semester. All of the presentations
were carried out via videoconference, and all the student teams used PowerPoint.
Spiro Stefanou, an expert in student assessment methodology, had created an
elaborate assessment program for the course when it was first offered at Penn
State. This methodology involved formal peer and team assessment by each team
member at three junctures of the course, with feedback to the teams after the
first two (mid-semester) evaluations. For year 3, we adapted this assessment
program to the cross-institutional project teams. We found that these
assessments helped to highlight perceived shortcomings and get teams to function
more effectively. Of course, the fact that 20% of the course grade was based on
the final peer evaluation scores served as an important motivator for effective
teamwork.
The Experience: Highlights and Lowlights
After three semesters of the Penn State-Saint Joseph's joint new product
development course, we have reached several conclusions. First, philosophically
and pedagogically, the partnership makes great sense. Students really benefit
from seeing the whole picture of the NPD process. Second, the participating
faculty members have learned a great deal from each other, enhancing our ability
to effectively teach new product development and innovation. Third, the food
industry seems to embrace our educational approach; virtually everyone we have
spoken with indicates that more of this type of cross-disciplinary, team-based
education is needed. Fourth, the students who have completed the course, while
experiencing many frustrations caused by a very different way of doing things,
understand that their exposure to this unique educational approach does prepare
them well for dealing with some of the challenges they can expect to face in
their careers.
On the other hand, this is by far the most demanding course any of the
participating faculty members have ever taught (and the combined experience
exceeds 75 years). The amount of planning and coordination proved to be much
more than any of us expected, as is the frustration created by technical
problems with videoconferences and the course web platform. We have found that
trial and error is the only real way to learn about the nuances of various
technologies and much of the trial takes place during class. Despite outstanding
technical support at both campuses (faculty members were responsible for course
content and process, but instructional design and technology specialists set up
and ran the videoconferences and provided access to CourseInfo), there were
frequent times, especially in years 1 and 2, when things simply did not work. We
learned from each occasion, made numerous changes, and improved dramatically
from year 1 to year 3. But we found that students expect television quality,
first time and every time. They are intolerant of technical problems, even those
we solved relatively quickly. Students admitted that sometimes even minor
technical glitches caused them to "tune out," rendering our efforts,
and those of industry experts, much less effective.
We also found that the distance between Philadelphia and State College (200
miles) and differences in campus culture and scheduling create real and
significant barriers to effective teamwork. Despite the attention to and
opportunities for team-building, creation of formal team contracts, faculty
mentoring, and setting up numerous and frequent opportunities to communicate,
all of the teams had problems "getting together" and the teams
functioned much less effectively than we expected. The team of faculty and
instructional design specialists noted that students were used to a more
structured approach to receiving information and communicating with the
professor and colleagues. Students rarely took the initiative to investigate how
they could communicate and research information in ways different from those
they have typically used to accomplish those tasks.
Students were frustrated with having to communicate with their groups at a
distance. Very different class schedules between the two campuses and among team
members, and the task of arranging facilities made it difficult to find times
when teams could meet to discuss their projects. They limited themselves to
communicating using videoconference and audio conference technologies. Team
mentors took some of the initiative to arrange and oversee team meetings, but
this effort was not equivalent across the four teams. Students did not take
advantage of other available technologies. They were encouraged to use
CourseInfo (using chat rooms, threaded discussions and email) to communicate
within their groups, but generally did not utilize these means of communication.
Final presentations in year 3 demonstrated that cross-functional teamwork helped
to prevent egregious errors and omissions from the new product development
projects. However, the overall quality of the four group presentations was
uneven.
It is interesting to note that two of the major reasons cited for failure of new
products are: (1) a new product idea is ahead of its time, and (2) the new
product requires a significant behavioral change on the part of the consumer.
Analogously, our attempt to use cross-campus, cross-disciplinary partnerships
requires a significant change in both student and faculty behavior. And like any
other innovation, it takes a while to successfully effect such a change, and it
happens only gradually.
Next Steps
Year 4 of the PSU-SJU partnership will take place during the fall 2001 semester.
The guiding philosophy and key objectives of the partnership remain the same but
the details of implementation are going to change somewhat. We will have common
class time each week for guest speakers and cross-campus instruction. The
courses at Penn State and Saint Joseph's will run parallel but separately. We
will share resources, including faculty resources, as we have done. In fact, the
faculty members will take a more active role in working with students at the
other campus. And we will continue to have a common course syllabus and website
so that students at both campuses have access to all course materials and can
communicate with each other. And we will have the same project expectations at
both schools. The teams will be school-specific. We are not backing away from
the cross-institutional model but we are adjusting our approach until we learn
how to make cross-campus project teams work more effectively.
In order to generate the benefits of the unique discipline focus at each school,
we will set up opportunities during our joint classes for students to advise and
critique their counterparts. SJU students will be required to incorporate
technical and business issues in their projects, and they will receive advice
and counsel from PSU students on these issues; similarly, the SJU students will
help the PSU students with their marketing programs and launch plans. Both
preliminary and final project presentations will involve both groups of students
presenting via videoconference, plus questions from judges for all of the groups
at both schools. In this manner, we hope to maintain the benefits of the
partnership but minimize the problems and frustrations.
Conclusion
Partnerships and alliances are a fact of life in the business world, as is the
need for effective team building and functioning. To the extent that students
can learn these skills in addition to normal course content, we enhance the
value of our students' education. Advances in communications technology provide
increasing opportunity to teach these skills. This paper describes one
educational initiative that, using videoconferencing and web technology, has
linked two campuses, two faculties and two groups of students. Much was
accomplished, but much more needs to be done to make such a partnership truly
viable.
Acknowledgements
The authors of this paper wish to acknowledge support from the food industry,
specifically the many speakers who have contributed to our course and especially
to Hershey Foods for their generosity in making both facilities and top managers
available for our students. The assistance of Julian Hernandez and Ellen
Taricani at Penn State and Jim Wilson at Saint Joseph's is gratefully
acknowledged.