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The twelve-unit course spans this Fall H2, IAP, and Spring H1. To take this class you must be prepared to work on your project over IAP. Class size is limited to 30 this year, and enrollment by instructor's permission. You must take both half-semester courses (no grade is assigned until work is completed in the spring). Units will be distributed as follows: 3 for Fall H2, 6 for IAP, and 3 for Spring H1. The class meets Fall 06 H2, Monday, 2:30 - 5:30, with the Spring 07 schedule to be determined to best meet participants' needs.
All projects are local save those undertaken by students enrolled in both 15.990 and GLab, in which case the students will do their GLab projects (see below).
How is 15.990 different from GLab?
Like GLab, 15.990 students work with teams of peers on a real-world project, dedicating three weeks of IAP to onsite work. And like GLab, 15.990 is designed to complement and extend your classroom learning, providing you with opportunities to put into practice what you are learning and offering you experience integrating a variety of theories, perspectives, and tools , both from your past coursework and from the classroom portion of the course.
While GLab projects tend to focus the student-host interaction during the 3-week offsite engagement, 15.990 is planned around interactions with the host organizations that take place over a longer period of time. In keeping with the central idea behind "Practicing Management," Unlike GLab, which sends students to host companies all over the globe, 15.990 projects are with companies in greater Boston. This is a critical difference, since 15.990 projects are designed to go "beyond consulting." With locally-based hosts,
The reasoning behind this: 15.990 projects allow for multi-stage engagements , where students develop and execute mini-experiments, to gather data and advance real learning at their host organization. Their So your 15.990 work over the fall allows you to design the IAP project as effectively as possible, using the forum of our classroom as a place to plan and design projects on an ongoing basis. And the work during IAP informs continued engagement with their your host in spring H1.
Although our 15.990 projects will be with companies and organizations in greater Boston, there's scope for some students to enroll in both GLab and 15.990. For student projects with locally-based hosts, this will be realatively easy to arrange; with the special 15.990-GLab projects, we'll work together to ensure that students can collaborate and work with their host organizations both in the Fall and in the Spring.
. GLab projects, on the other hand, tend to be a one-stage engagement, without expectation of ongoing involvement for student teams -- although student invovlement during the actual engagement is very intense. GLab students conduct an analysis and make recommendations -- possibly developing a business plan, market analysis, or new-market-entry strategy for a foreign firm. While interaction is clearly centralto GLab projects, because of their nature, this is essentially a consultative approach, where GLab projects are scoped such that all work for the host may be completed by the end of IAP. During Spring H1, GLab students deliver final presentations to their professors and peers, reflect on their learning, and speculate on the potential impact of their recommendations (if their hosts follow through). During Spring H1, 15.990 students remain intimately engaged with their host companies. They develop and execute additional mini-experiments, and make a strategic hand-off, so that hosts take ownership of student work, and take it to the next level.
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