Spain's ESADE Business School and IBM make teaching more effective and learning more fun with INNOV8

What distinguishes an institute of higher learning from the norm is much more than a fine heritage and long-held traditions. While taking pride in the past, today’s colleges and universities are bound more than ever to look beyond the ivy-covered walls in order to help students prepare to take their places in a future that’s constantly changing.

In alliance with IBM, ESADE Business School demonstrated its commitment to prepare skilled, imaginative leaders for the business world of the 21st century when it implemented a course that takes place in a compelling virtual-learning environment at its campus in Barcelona, Spain. Based on IBM INNOV8, the course is presented as a ‘serious game,’ a novel teaching method that makes learning both relevant and fun. What is most significant is that INNOV8 makes learning more effective than traditional classroom lectures and exercises alone.

IBM collaborates with ESADE and with educators worldwide through the IBM Academic Initiative, offering a wide range of benefits and resources to help teachers guide students through learning the skills necessary to compete, keep up with and set the pace in the workplace that awaits them. Participating faculty members gain on-line access to IBM technologies and courseware which they can download and use for their own teaching purposes.

Reaction to the course from the students has been overwhelmingly positive.

After graduating in 2009 with a master’s degree in financial management, Covadonga Garcia Calvo, from Vigo, Spain, aims to begin a career as consultant or in the finance department of a multinational company. “The course was beneficial for my career goals because in INNOV8 I had to apply my skills, knowledge and common sense to be successful,” she said. ”I was able to learn from my mistakes and put all the business theory, skills and knowledge acquired while earning my degree into practice, just like I will have to in real life.”

Claudia Herrera, from Mexico City, Mexico, is seeking a degree in advanced management through the ESADE student exchange program. She also has her sights set on a career in consulting. “In my future career it will be crucial for me to know how to find the best way to solve a problem. With INNOV8, I was able to practice strategies in order to reach an objective,” Herrera said. “It helped me to understand in a practical way how things work when a problem arises in a company and how you have to deal with different kinds of people in order to succeed.”

Javier Busquets, a professor and director of the management of information systems (MIS) department at ESADE, has been collaborating with IBM for more than six years. He is the recipient of an IBM Faculty Award for his research in service science and innovation. And, together with Joan Ramon Mallart, a lecturer in the same department, he was granted an award by the North American Case Research Association for a case study analyzing the technological innovation strategy of the IBM Banking Industry Solution Center in Barcelona. Mallart is also a consultant with IBM Global Business Services and serves as the IBM Academic Initiative Ambassador to ESADE. Busquets said that the role of IBM Ambassador is key in the relationship between IBM and ESADE and that Mallart’s unique perspective makes him particularly effective.

“Our IBM Ambassador understands the workings and complexities of both a huge corporation and an educational institution,” said Busquets. “He brings to us an important mix of diverse realities and that’s a great value in our development of courses that help students bridge the gaps between business management and information technology.”

Both men were instrumental in bringing the INNOV8 course to ESADE, teaming with Miguel Allue, also an ESADE lecturer, and Jordi Busquets, a manager at the IBM Innovation Center in Barcelona and guest lecturer at ESADE.

High standards and an entrepreneurial spirit

ESADE was founded in 1958 by a small, but innovative group of businessmen. Associated with Spain’s prestigious Ramon Llull University system and with campuses in Barcelona and Madrid, Spain, and in Buenos Aires, Argentina, ESADE is now internationally recognized for its entrepreneurial spirit and high standards in its Master of Business Administration (MBA), Executive Education and Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) programs.

The Wall Street Journal named ESADE the “top international business school” in both 2006 and 2007 and, in 2008, ranked the ESADE Executive MBA program as number one in Europe -- a rating based on the results of interviews with graduating students and hiring companies, for whom “workplace relevance” and “quality of course content” were cited as significant rating factors.

A course geared for a new generation

When ‘INNOV8: A BPM Simulator Course’ was introduced to 30 BBA students in the fall semester of 2008, ESADE became one of the first educational institutions to incorporate serious gaming into its course curriculum. Serious games are computer programs that, rather than for entertainment, are used as training tools to simulate real-world situations.

“Raised in a world of video games, the current generation of students learned young to think fast, act fast and make real-time decisions,” said Mallart. “So they feel tremendously at ease discovering and absorbing new concepts in this way.”

Attending lectures, studying and writing papers will always be an important part of student education at ESADE. But the INNOV8 simulator course takes learning way beyond the traditional project or study group where theories and examples are researched, analyzed and discussed. INNOV8 allows students to ‘step into’ a dynamic virtual business environment and actually experience how individuals and teams interact and need to collaborate in the real world. Students gain practical insight and experience as they apply the various business and technology strategies they’ve studied and can observe in real time how the decisions they make can affect an organization’s performance.

The ESADE course was developed jointly by faculty members and the management and support team at the IBM Innovation Center in Barcelona. It is based on IBM INNOV8, an interactive, three-dimensional (3D) business simulator, and incorporates IBM WebSphere® Business Modeler, a software program that enables users to visualize, document and model business processes. The course objective was to give students a broad business perspective, helping them learn and apply a combination of business process management (BPM), component business modeling (CBM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts and practices. CBM is a technique used to identify and map activities across lines of business and isolate those that show potential for growth, innovation or improvement. SOA is an approach to IT architecture that supports integrating business processes as linked, repeatable tasks, or services.

ESADE and IBM put together a full 30-credit-hour course that integrates INNOV8 with BPM, CBM and SOA theory and concepts and links all of those with the WebSphere Business Modeler to create realistic scenarios that students may actually encounter some day. Through practical experience, today’s students were able to envision how they will improve their effectiveness as tomorrow’s business leaders, applying SOA and other techniques to respond quickly and intuitively to changing market expectations and business demands.

Let the games begin!

For the first run of the ESADE INNOV8 course, students played the ‘Smart Customer Service’ game on their classroom computers using the keyboard and mouse. Their challenge was to improve customer service while managing the call center at a fictitious technology company. A producer of hi-tech devices, the company had recently acquired another company with a complementary product line which now had to be supported by the customer service department. Players sharpened their problem-solving skills while mapping out business processes, identifying bottlenecks and exploring ‘what if’ scenarios.

During the game, each student player proceeded through the simulation as an avatar (an on-screen persona representing herself or himself in the form of a 3D model), interacting with other employees to gather information. As in real life, there were stumbling blocks -- the information they acquired was sometimes inconsistent and some workmates simply did not want to recognize problems or accept changes to existing processes. All along the way, players made their own decisions and were given multiple choice questions as a guide.

Scoring was based on a student’s ability to obtain the right information from the right stakeholders, and how they sorted it all out to determine an appropriate business process solution. Afterwards, players shared successes and failures as they engaged in team evaluations and analyses of their individual and collective results.

The four lecturers agree that the INNOV8 course has been a true journey of discovery, both for the students and for themselves as teachers.

Enhancements to the BBA course for the 2009 fall semester will include an upgrade to the latest version of INNOV8 and two additional games -- ‘Smarter Supply Chain’ and ‘Smarter Traffic’ -- in which student players will be challenged to manage a supply chain for greater efficiency and profitability and to regulate the flow of traffic through cities, all while reducing environmental impacts. In addition, the games will be included in a new, two-semester MBA course called ‘Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation,’ led by the same team of ESADE and IBM lecturers.

“Play is a natural way for people to make use of their natural talents,” declared Javier Busquets. “With imagination, our students are learning how to solve problems that may not even exist yet.”