MBA Case Study EssayP_xrhty

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CASE STUDY ESSAY
This Case Study is part of the application process for the 2 0 1 5 full-time MBA programme at
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Please carefully read the New York Times article on the
following pages and answer the questions below in the field provided. Please write no more than one
page (500 words).




What do you think about the apps created by the college students?
How you define innovation? Please give examples of ground-breaking innovations.
What do you think is necessary to create business innovations?

Applicant name

Date

Article sourced from The New York Times. This article remains the Copyright of The New York Times and was originally published
in 2014. All Rights Reserved.

Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two
By Ariel Kaminer

Vaibhav Verma was frustrated that he could not get into the most popular courses at Rutgers University, so he
decided to try a new approach.
He didn’t sleep outside classrooms to be first in line when the door opened, or send professors a solicitous note.
Instead, he built a web-based application that could repeatedly query the New Jersey university’s registration
system. As soon as anyone dropped the class, Mr. Verma’s tool would send him a message, and he would grab
the open spot.
“I built it just because I was a little bit bored,” he said.
By the next semester, 8,000 people had used it.
At Brown University, Jonah Kagan had a clever idea of his own: Get his fellow students to name their three
favorite courses, and use the results as a guide for people seeking great, unusual electives. Building the website
was easy, but he could not persuade Brown to give him enrollment figures, which would have allowed him to
control for differences in class size. So the survey died.
Experiences like those two are becoming common at campuses around the country, as students are showing up
the universities that trained them by producing faster, easier-to-navigate, more informative and generally just
better versions of the information systems at the heart of undergraduate life.
Students now arriving for fall semester may find course catalogs that they can instantly sort and re-sort
according to every imaginable search criteria. Scheduling programs that allow someone to find the 47 different
classes that meet Thursdays at 8:30 p.m., then narrow them down to those that have no prerequisites, then
narrow again to those that count toward requirements in two majors. Or apps that allow you to see what courses
your friends are considering, or figure out who has the same free periods that you do, or plot the quickest route
between two far-flung classrooms.
But this culture of innovation has accelerated debates about the flow of information on campus, and forced
colleges to reckon with some unexpected results of the programming skills they are imparting.
Last year 19 students at Baruch College in Manhattan used a computer script to check for openings in crowded
courses — at such high frequency that they nearly took down not just Baruch’s computer system but also that of
the entire City University of New York. That earned them a stern talking-to. On the other hand, the scheduling
app that two University of California, Berkeley, students devised worked so well that administrators decided to
adapt it for official use.
These encounters have proved to be educational, though not always in the way the colleges intend.
“What I really learned,” Mr. Kagan said of his negotiations with Brown, “is how hard it is to get the data you
need out of these old legacy school information systems.”
To some extent, the tension reflects a basic difference in worldview.
“Students are always more entrepreneurial and understand needs better than bureaucracies can,” said Harry R.
Lewis, the director of undergraduate studies for Harvard’s computer science department, “since bureaucracies
tend to have messages they want to spin, and priorities they have to set, and students just want stuff that is
useful. I know this well, since students were talking to me about moving the Harvard face books online seven
years before Zuckerberg just went and did it without asking permission.”
Zach Hall saw that up close when, as a student at Furman University, he developed a course-selection website
that included a wide array of useful functions. “Classget.com beat the socks off the course listings that the
university was putting out there,” recalled Brad Barron, the registrar at the South Carolina institution. But,
worried that it might harm the university’s computer system, Mr. Hall recalled, “the I.T. department kind of

freaked out.”
Eventually, however, they proposed a compromise: Internet technology officials would make it easier for him to
get the data he required if he would remove the links to rate-your-professor sites (which never go over well with
the professors being rated). He took the deal.
To help their fellow student-developers, 10 students and newly graduated seniors from colleges around the
country converged on a lodge at Lake Tahoe last summer for what they called a Campus Data Summit. They
have since published a guidebook for dealing with recalcitrant university administrations, including advice like
“be proactive about their fears,” “make friends with faculty” and, perhaps most crucially, ask for “forgiveness,
not permission.”
Amy Quispe, a summit-meeting organizer who was finishing her studies at Carnegie Mellon University, said
struggles over campus data were so bad in some cases that “in a lot of ways students’ creativity was being
stifled.”
Campus software developers say they see evidence that some colleges are becoming more comfortable with
these collaborations, though as with any learning process, the path is not always a straight one.
Alex Sydell and William Li collaborated on a website, Ninja Courses, that made it easy for fellow students at
Berkeley, and later at four more U.C. campuses, to compare every aspect of different courses as they built their
schedule for the semester. Berkeley saw the website’s value and went so far as to pay them for their innovation.
(“For students, the offer they gave us was very generous,” is all Mr. Li will say about the amount.)
But when their point person moved onto another job, Mr. Sydell says, they got a cease-and-desist letter accusing
them, among other things, of violating U.C. copyrights by using the colleges’ names.
Those concerns appear to have been assuaged; Ninja Courses now has over 50,000 registered users.
Yale University, which initially shut down a website that the twin brothers Harry Yu and Peter Xu built to make
the course catalog easier to navigate, later admitted that it did not really understand the processes it was trying to
regulate. “Questions of who owns data are evolving before our very eyes,” Mary Miller, the dean of Yale
College, said at the time. “What we now see is that we need to review our policies and practices.”
Some universities are bringing student software developers directly into the fold. Stanford administrators liked
Kevin Conley’s idea for an app with information about the campus bus service, so they gave him a job building
it. It is now available free at the iTunes app store.
At Brown, where Mr. Kagan had trouble getting enrollment figures, Ravi Pendse, the university’s new chief
information officer, said that when it came to sharing data, schools “tend to be risk averse, and with good
reason” — starting with laws that require them to protect students’ privacy. “The easiest answer is to say no.”
He has taken a different approach, however, starting what he calls “a student software hub for collaboration and
innovation,” designed to support students with ideas about how to connect campus information systems. “I wish
Jonah Kagan would come back, and we’ll work with him,” he said.
Many campus developers say the next frontier is for more colleges to get comfortable releasing their
information not case by case, but in uniform formats known as A.P.I.s (for application programming interfaces).
That would make it possible, they say, to create tools that work at Florida State University as well as they do at
Alaska Bible College. Students at disparate schools could spend time building on one another’s efforts instead
of just replicating them.
“It turns out if you give students that power they’ll do some pretty great things with it.” said Alexey
Komissarouk, who started a student group called PennApps while at the University of Pennsylvania.
It has done some pretty great things for the students, too. Ms. Quispe now works at Google. Mr. Kagan works at
Clever, an educational start-up that assembles student data from K-12 schools around the country. Mr. Li is still
running Ninja Courses. And Mr. Sydell works at DropBox. He said he could not be sure how much Ninja
Courses helped him get the job, but added, “I’d guess that it scored some bonus points.”
Source: Kaminer, A. (2014) Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two, The New York Times, 28 August, p. A1.
© The New York Times [2014]. All Rights Reserved.

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