Lean Innovation of Course Unit Contents

Designing courses for emerging areas of study is subject to clear challenges. If the envisaged courses are directly paid by the students – as it is the case of this research – they are actually the customers whose requirements have to be satisfied. Traditional approaches for collecting student requirements are not feasible for building up very novel topics. For such cases, an approach for course unit design that respects the lean philosophy is introduced in this paper. Lean is about creation of more value for students with fewer resources; or maximizing value while minimizing waste. The approach is based on the paradigm that, in highly dynamic and strong competitive educational markets, top quality courses must be designed from the very early stages. A hypothesis-based process defines the “content-prototype” of the course, which is further tested via web-based surveys that are directed to potential students. Results are statistically interpreted and a refined course content is formulated. The prototype for the most delicate module of the course is elaborated to test the level of delight of potential students (also called the WOW effect). Lessons learned are then considered to design the “promoter-prototype” of the course. A focus group is then used to test if potential students will feel a special experience interacting with the course content (also known as the KANDO effect). The methodology was experimented to design a master course unit on digital entrepreneurship. Empirical researches reveal the viability of the methodology to extract the appropriate topics of a course in emerging areas of study. Researches also show that a well-piloted strategy for course delivery should be in place to achieve the desired market impact.