Expansion and Innovation

I am in Bachelor’s Gulch Colorado awaiting the start of Engage! 14 Bachelor’s Gulch.  Engage! is the brilliant brainchild of Rebecca Grinnals and you need know that it is the only conference for luxury wedding professionals that matters.  While the information and speakers are terrific, the point is community.  A time to come together without ego and allow the future to unfold, letting ideas flow and energies merge in a way that cannot help but create opportunity to move the industry forward.

Circumstance is always my friend.  Engage! starts today and the lead story in The New York Times’ Business Section is “Business School, Disrupted” discussing Harvard Business School’s venture into online education with HBX, the program.  HBS has decided to create a pre-HBS if you will with three core classes that will be available so that graduates will be accredited with being able to speak the language of business.  Credential of Readiness they are calling it.  There will be an exam and a paper certificate upon completion.  The cost is $1,500 with the three classes to be done in nine weeks.

Compare that with Coursera where similar content from other amazing business schools is available for free.  The philosophy of those business schools is to put as much information as possible out there and reap rewards of massive access ala Ted.

HBX is a wonderful example of A Perfect Egg – a new business derived from the core business but with a unique value proposition of its own.  Coursera and free access is more of a diffusion, there to support the core without necessarily creating another business.

Underlying both models though is one thought.  Online education is here to stay.  Opportunity awaits and those who sit still or, worse, do not delve deeply into what can be done will get run over.  More to the point, if you do not have the legacy of Harvard, Penn or Stanford, you are going to have to figure out how to be more nimble, niched to find your place.  Three points then.  If you are the known player in your market, you must stay true to who you are while thinking about what “who you are” actually means.  If you are up and coming, own your niche and only your niche; be known for being the absolute best at one thing, not twelve.  Last, what makes no sense today is tomorrow’s no-brainer.

If there is a bandwagon, please do not jump on it just to jump on it.  There will always be another one.  The best line in the whole NYT article is from Professor Michael Porter, “I think the big risk in any new technology is to believe technology is the strategy.  Just because 200,000 people sign up doesn’t mean it is a good idea.”  Creative business is about NOT being a sheep, going along with the herd.  By definition, creative business is about charting your own path, creating for a living. The business underlying the art demands innovation given a new platform.  Better said, when the new platform finds adoption and acceptance, more opportunity is created.  Harvard was not the first into online education, Apple not the first into cellphones, or Facebook into social networks.  Sometimes being first is all that matters, more often though, it is about seizing what the new road presents.  For luxury wedding professionals, no better place to explore the new road than Engage!.