Final Project

Creativity + Virtualization =?

      Creativity is defined as novelty and useful, while virtualization enables team to employ geographically dispersed people who use technology and communication to accomplish their work across time and space [7]. How can we make these two perfectly align with each other and create a valuable outcome? Here, Team UPSTAIRS are presenting our final project with an innovative idea that utilizing advantages from both creativity and virtualization.

Introduction of Both Parties

We are UPSTAIRS CO.

      Currently, our team UPSTAIRS is operating an employment solution company both online and offline. We provide premier global online employment solution for people seeking jobs and the employers who need great people. We have been doing this for over ten years, and have expanded from our roots as a "job board" to a global provider of a full array of job seeking, career management, recruitment and talent management products and services. At the heart of our success and our future is innovation: we are changing the way people think about work, and we are helping them actively improve their lives and their workforce performance with new technology, tools and practices.

      We pioneered the notion of helping people get more out of work by showing them that a better job was out there. But the workplace has evolved – people expect more control; people seek more perspective; people crave more enrichment. Therefore, we do not just sell better jobs; we help people promote better lives. Simply put, our mission is to inspire people to improve their lives.

      Now we are trying to utilize the capabilities we have possessed, human capitals, and expand our current market to serve more customers. Since we try to enhance our dominant position in Great China market, this time we seek a strategic way to expand our offerings by collaborating with another powerful partner – Groupstudy.com.

Our Strategic Partner – Groupstudy.com

      Groupstudy.com is an e-book provider, a virtual study community, and a platform for insights sharing based on a virtual office on the cloud, and connected talents from different cities. Their major products, the digital textbooks, are available on our Cloud Platform, which can be visit by inputting our website address on your computers, or by download our APP on either iTunes Store or Google Play. They also build a virtual community called Study Group that enable knowledge sharing among users from different places, even miles away, breaking the geographic constraints and enlarge their study circle remarkably from a classroom to the whole world. The users’ positively posts of their insights, points and solutions on textbooks make the community consolidated.

      Groupstudy.com consists of four working units, operation, development, marketing, and IT supports. It is a pure virtual company due to the purpose of minimizing operation cost and sourcing talent worldwide. We value the way of their virtual operating as well as their current talented employees and customers from worldwide, hence, we choose Groupstudy.com as our strategic partner for further expansion.

Current Market Trend

      From our perspective, we are a professional employment solution, how can we collaborate with our partner, Groupstudy.com, is the key. We share common goals, we are trying to expand market providing with more services, to target new customer segmentation with creativity, and to offer our customers with best values. Moreover, we want to advance our operating process by learning from our partner - Groupstudy.com. In order to develop a creative and implementable project, we keep close eyes on current market trend and news.

      Surprisingly, we find an increasing demand for interest classes in Mainland China market[4][8][13]. A lot of news are talking about interest classes for adults. Following are some screenshot from online news .

      Since it is a brand new market in China even in the world, we need to conduct our own research to determine its profitability. When we seach deeper, we find that lots of adults interest classes are founded in big cities in China as the increasing demands from white-collars, housewives, and college students in recent years. However, interests targeting adults customers are still under-developed. Take search engine results as an example, the searching results of “成人兴趣班(adults interests class)” is around 1,940,000 against 7,160,000 which is the searching results of “儿童兴趣班(children interest class)” in Google [2][3].

      Although the number of results shown in Google does not equal to the real life, the 5 million gap does reflect the huge disparity of developmental levels. The conclusion is oblivious, the market of adult interest class is under-developed and there is a huge potential inside, due to the increasing demands from customers.

      As we do our market research deeper and deeper, another fact draws our attention. In some big cities, maybe the adult interest class there could satisfy the customers’ needs with wide-enough choices. However, in medium or small cities, customers are lacking of insufficient choices of courses. Besides, the instructors and educational institutions there are not as qualified as the ones in big cities. All these problems are caused by the limited number of customers in medium or small cities, which prevents the educational institutions from economies of scale that directly influences the profitability of the organization. 

Professional-Interest-Class.com

      By knowing current market trend and situation, we decide to step into the online education market targeting adult interest class. We establish a new joint-company called Professional-Interest-Class.com to enter the market.

      Professional-Interest-Class.com is an online teaching website offering distinct and full sets of interest classes through computer and mobile terminals. It is a pure online organization satisfies the needs of customers’ in medium and small size Mainland cities. Our project targets white-collars, housewives, and college students since they have relatively large amount of leisure time and strong willingness of trying new things.

      Professional-Interest-Class.com provides special designed interest classes by integrating Chinese cultures, particularly with Chinese culture heritages. For instance, we now offer Chinese painting and calligraphy course, special local Chinese cuisines making course (e.g. Fried Pancakes/烧饼, Zongzi/粽子, & Shimawuxiang/石码五香), and Chinese tea culture.

      To answer the question of why we are going online specifically, we post following video clip that explains everything. Online education is the future, and has been proven by numerous scholars and top universities. Enjoy watching.

Implementatbility Analysis

      Before put our Professional-Interest-Class.com into action, we need to conduct a detailed analysis about its potential obstacles we need to overcome. Our analysis comes from both theoretical and practical perspectives to ensure its implementability.

Theoretical Perspective

I. Creativity

      As we mentioned before, creativity is defined as novelty and useful. As it indicates in Week 4 lecture, there are plenty sources of new ideas for creativity [14].

  

      From the lecture, we know that the rapid changing environment produce many directions that could be used as creative business opportunity, they are economy, supplier, employees, management, distribution channels, government regulation, maverick, competitors, customers, and technology. The items of customers and distribution channels act as strong proofs for our Professional-Interest-Class.com, a brand new market customer’s segmentation and distribution channel of mobile terminals for online teaching, which are quite convincing.

      We focus our customer on white-collars, housewives, and college students and try to satisfy their needs. In order to justify our customers is a desirable market for our business; we have conducted a basic marketing research trying to get knowledge of the current customer categories covered by other similar products. Through the results of our research, the first problem we have realized is that it is very hard to find an online university from internet. Even though we find one online university, there are also many problems with is that cannot satisfy customers’ demands, such as limited classes and lack of Chinese elements.

      For example, the following picture comes from the homepage of a current online university. It only focuses on test preparation, higher education & professional training [6], which could not fulfill the huge demands of interest learning of our potential customers.

      Even if we find an online university with interest class offered, it is quite problematic. Looking at the picture on the left, open one of its subjects, we can find that it contains so-called “Hobbies Classes”, however, those class are not their main focus [11]. The “Hobbies Classes” are acting as supplements of other professional classes. In other words, they are not professionals in this arena. It is obvious that these courses could meet the needs of potential customers’ various interests. Go to one class, we find that the way of teaching is unilateral. Customers could only have a video to watch, there is no way for them to reflect their confusion and opinions. On contrary, our Professional-Interest-Class.com offers a very specific and variety of classes, particularly targeting Chinese heritages. Moreover, we even have customer made class. If our customers could not find the class that he wants, he could reflect their needs to our marketing department and we will organize this class customly. Except of abundant courses, we also build up a two-way communication channel between customers and lecturers. Our classes are conducted virtually; lecturers and students could interact with each other freely through the help of live video conference. After class, students are welcomed to ask or post their questions to our online board that builds for knowledge sharing between students and students, and students and lecturers. Even the classes are over, we will inform lecturers in time when questions are posted on board, and answers will also be post on board for students to review.

II. Distribution Channel

      Another way of been creative is imagining new uses for old ideas, which means old ideas that have been captured and remembered are plugged into new context [5]. Delivering education through mobile terminals in not a recent invention, we have so many e-books, video classes like TED are issuing online. Although mobile terminals are not an advanced and new technology, but the way we use it for our class is absolutely novel. 

      There are two reasons that we concerned, the first one is the large amount of mobile terminals users. With the spreading of mobile phone and updating of mobile software, cellphones such as Samsung, HTC and iPhone are extremely available for running our program, accessing to our classes could be very convenient at everywhere has internet. Another reason is that there is no application currently available for online live learning, which is a huge market gap.

      Take number of iOS APPs as an example, from the following chart, we have counted and categorized all available applications from apple store. The red line tells the number of educational applicants, which indicates a large amount uses who interested in learning [1]. However, in this huge category, we have surprisingly found that none of them offers live teaching service [1]. This empty of online education application is such a waste in terms of the tremendous market. In other words, it is a great opportunity for our company to gain customers and market share through this new channel of distribution.

III. Virtual Organizing

      Virtual organizing requires harmony among three vectors, customer interaction, asset sourcing, and knowledge leverage [12]. The customer interaction vector (virtual encounter) deal with the new challenges and opportunities for company-to-customer interactions. With the development of IT, customers can experience the remote products and services. For the asset configuration (virtual sourcing), companies use Internet for structuring the portfolio of relationships to deliver the value to the customers. The third vector, knowledge leverage (virtual expertise), concerns the opportunities for leveraging the sources of expertise within and across organizational boundaries. Each of the vectors has three distinct stages in virtual organizing. The virtual organizing of our Professional-Interest-Class.com belongs to stage 1 in virtual encounter, stage 3 in virtual sourcing, and stage 3 in virtual expertise (See table 1 below). The following paragraphs give more detailed reasons and specific examples to explain the virtual organizing.

      Our virtual organizing, in customer interaction, belongs to the stage one, remote experience of services. Due to the insufficiency of the amount of people with the same interests, like Chinese calligraphy, the courses cannot be held in the same city physically. However, with the development of the IT, people can learn through Internet, which is a good way for us to provide the remote service. Our website provides a virtual classroom to the customers. Customers can sit before the computer and listen to the live professional lectures. From the theoretical perspective, we can see that in the virtual organizing process, the collaboration in customer interaction belongs to the remote experience of services stage. Example of the customer interaction is live online interests courses and lectures.

      In terms of the asset configuration, our virtual organizing step into the stage 3, resource coalitions. Resource coalitions focus on the establishment of the resource network. A corporation becomes a portfolio of capabilities and relationships. In our collaboration, the promotion channels provided by our partner, the lecture materials and the copyright of the materials are the resource coalitions of the two companies. These resources could be absorbed that becoming part of both companies’ knowledge assets. Our company, UPSTAIRS, is responsible for seeking the teachers with professional capabilities. Our partner, Groupstudy.com, provides digital textbook, available Cloud Platform and virtual community. All of our contributions could be considered as assets for two companies. As the table showed above, teaching materials could be noticed as the asset configuration.

      Speaking of knowledge leverage, we step into the third stage, professional community expertise. The core value of the knowledge in the professional community expertise is to leverage the expertise increasingly in extended network and broader professional community. Knowledge sharing is more significant in modern company management and development [9]. For our virtual organizing, we not only invite the professional lecturers to our courses, but also need our staffs to coordinate with the teachers. Help them to establish a virtual community to share the teaching experience and build up the relationship with other teachers to seek the cooperation among them. Meanwhile, our customers could participate in our knowledge sharing system to enrich the knowledge of our community.

Practical Perspective

      Many organizations use virtual organizing in commerce, especially in the traditional industries [10]. People find out new channels to promote and sell products through cooperate with technology companies. In the reality, when we determine the virtual organizing, we are facing three major problems. First problem is where and how to find the experienced interest teachers. The next problem is how to get the related materials, and the third problem is who can provide the online teaching classroom. From the practical perspective, our company, UPSTAIRS, is an employment solution company, holding tremendous employee resource. Therefore, we can provide professional and experienced teachers information to the virtual organizing and invite them to teach online. We use the commission to calculate the income for the teachers. Our partner, Groupstudy.com, is an e-book provider and holding various textbook materials. They can transform hardcopy materials into e-book and edit them as the teaching materials. They also can edit the teaching materials based on the teachers’ special requirements. Thanks to our partner, the second problem can be solved in the virtual organizing. Additionally, the IT department of Groupstudy.com is capable to offer the online equipment and establish the virtual platform. Therefore, they are in charge of the third problem that Professional-Interest-Class.com is facing.

Final Notes

      To sum up, our project, Professional-Interest-Class.com, combines one professional employment solution company and one e-book providing company while targeting a brand new niche market with the help of creativity and virtualization. Following screenshot is our future classroom service, cross-stitching, which is already put in debugging.

      Professional-Interest-Class.com acts as the first mover in this particular market, and it has limitless potential of profitability. Professional-Interest-Class.com, as a promising project, is now welcoming all smart investments from you!

Bibliography

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