Core Notes Program – High Level Overview Sales Meeting August, 2011

2 New Product Line: Core Notes Program Roll-Out Largest Revenue Opportunity Lowest HBP Market Share Opportunity for HBP to launch core notes program in major disciplines for traditional MBA curriculum Study of average MBA syllabus signaled interesting opportunity for HBP penetration of a new content area

3 New Product Line: Core Notes Program Roll-Out Potential for Disruption Strategic Advantages for HBP Opportunistic response to 2 phenomena  Disaggregation efficiencies generated by digital technology  Increasing dissatisfaction with practices and culture of leading textbook publishers Ability for faculty to dispense with multi-vendor supply line Opportunity for customers to source all pedagogical content from HBP Offering in digital format only avoids high costs of physical production, inventorying and shipping allowing for low price point relative to traditional textbooks Exploiting HBS’ unparalleled brand power and HBP’s access to HBS faculty New revenue stream for HE Increased revenues from established products  Liberates sizable share of student course materials budget  Facilitates adoption of more HBP content (cases, articles, sims) Fortifies HBP’s reputation as dependable source of high-quality teaching materials serving widest range of pedagogical needs Addresses growing market challenges posed by aging HBS technical note collection

4 Primary Elements of the Core Notes Project  Ten Core Notes for the higher education market available for use for the fall semester 2012  The Notes will cover core conceptual material in Operations Management, at a level typical of first year MBA courses at top business schools  The objective is to supplant the current use of textbooks and other conceptual materials that business school faculty assign to complement cases in operations management  The last critical element in the HBP family of learning objects for a typical syllabus  Modular approach: Professors will be able to assign the full set of available Notes in place of a text book, or just the individual Notes they need  “Micro-transactions” 

5 Product Policy – Core Notes  Length: Approximately 15,000 words, or 30 pages  Some Notes will be shorter or longer, as required by the content  Accompanying Teaching Guide will be approximately 3-5 pages  Content: Approximately twenty pages of the note will constitute essential reading  The remaining ten pages will be optional material that the professor can assign depending on student ability, interest, time, etc.  The essential reading will be as generic as possible, applicable to any type of organizational context and international in perspective  Probable topics for short pieces of optional material are: optional side topics related to material, more advanced math that supports the math in essential reading, sample problems applied to real organizations, recent research trends on the topic, recent business innovations on the topic

6 Product Policy (continued) – Core Notes  The accompanying Teaching Guide will recommend a few discussion questions for class, and also HBS cases and simulations that reinforce the material  For each case and simulation listed, there will be a description of how it applies to the material in the Note.  For each Note, there will also be an accompanying PowerPoint slide deck to use in class, Length will be 3-5 slides  For each Note, there might also be one or several accompany calculator/tools  Tools will be very simple, individual-user based  Goal of tools is the build intuition behind the relationship between parameters in a model discussed in the essential text.  Tools could be embedded in the text.  Pricing: tbd, but likely based on current pricing model for cases and HBR articles

7 Next Steps in Product Development Work  Release market research survey  Analyze survey data  Finalize detailed outline of topical coverage  From analyzed data and discussions with HBS faculty, develop a draft topic outline for each Note  Recruit faculty authors for the Notes in addition to “Uber-editor” for the core note series  Recruit peer reviewers, expert teaching panel, and beta testers  Select interior designer and create a design template A lot of work in a short period of time! 

8 Tentative Note Topics  Introduction to Operations Management and Its Link to Strategy and Finance  Process Mapping and Analysis  Constraint Management and Capacity Planning  Quality Management  Lean Systems: JIT (for example)  Sources and Consequences of Variability  Inventory  Forecasting  Supply Chain Management  Innovation Management, Product and Process Design

9 Link to Educational Technology  Development of six supporting “mini-simulations” in operations management  Potential topics include: quality management, constraint management, process mapping  Look and feel very similar to the operations management mini-simulation highlighting process variability (car wash mini-sim)  Simulations will be authored by core note authors  Additional supporting educational technology in the form of calculators and tools  Potential topics include: