"The Drop"
This past weekend up at BGI, our Marketing class did an exercise called "The Drop." When we started, our professor told us that it has been performed by countless business school students all over the world, although never quite like we were doing it. The scenario was that we needed to deliver protein to people living in the high mountains of Madagascar... in the form of eggs. Of course, there are complications: You can't land a plane there, people speak 25 different dialects, and they have never seen or eaten an egg.
We were given a bag full of materials to use in constructing our "delivery mechanism," which was the "product" we were selling to the government, who had hired us as consultants to solve this problem. We could only use the materials from that bag-- things like rubber bands, balloons, styrofoam cups, paper, string, and wooden sticks.
Adding one more dimension, there were preferred design criteria: Cost should be minimized (achieved by choosing the fewest possible types of materials); environmental impact should be minimized (styrofoam... not so good); the integrity of the egg must be visible from the outside of the package; and for some reason, the natives preferred square/boxy shapes to other shapes. The egg would be dropped from 15 feet high, and had to hit a target 10 feet out. Accuracy was counted in your final score.
Finally, we had to produce "marketing materials" for our product -- ie, a brief for the government about how it works, as well as an instruction manual for the natives to use in retrieving and cooking the egg. (The latter should be done in pictures, given the 25 different dialects). The quality of these added into your score (but watch out! Each color you include in your marketing materials raises the cost!)
Oh, yeah-- and we had to accomplish the task in 1 hour, in teams of 5-6 people.
It was a blast! We were allowed 2 test eggs that could be broken if early designs didn't work. Then we were given a final egg for the Official Government Demonstration. Here are pictures from the demo! (Note: Only available until Dec 15th). You can see various teams' designs. And you can see that not all the eggs survived :-).
My team was the first one shown. Our cone-shaped delivery device (OK, so it wasn't square...) landed very nearly on the target and kept the egg intact! Our marketing materials weren't top-notch, and the device wasn't so elegant, so we didn't win overall, but we did win the "Eco-Star" prize for having the most environmentally friendly design. The overall winner was the 4th device shown in the slideshow, with the striped wings.
Overall, it was a great exercise. We had to quickly get through all the team dynamics challenges, so we could settle on a design, test it, and produce marketing for it. We disregarded a lot of barriers that would normally exist, such as people's tendency to hold onto information and only share strategically to the degree that it benefits them: We shared freely and enjoyed the process. On the other hand, in "real life" we would have had access to more experts and more information instead of doing so much guesswork and hacking together of things in a somewhat sloppy way.
What fun!
We were given a bag full of materials to use in constructing our "delivery mechanism," which was the "product" we were selling to the government, who had hired us as consultants to solve this problem. We could only use the materials from that bag-- things like rubber bands, balloons, styrofoam cups, paper, string, and wooden sticks.
Adding one more dimension, there were preferred design criteria: Cost should be minimized (achieved by choosing the fewest possible types of materials); environmental impact should be minimized (styrofoam... not so good); the integrity of the egg must be visible from the outside of the package; and for some reason, the natives preferred square/boxy shapes to other shapes. The egg would be dropped from 15 feet high, and had to hit a target 10 feet out. Accuracy was counted in your final score.
Finally, we had to produce "marketing materials" for our product -- ie, a brief for the government about how it works, as well as an instruction manual for the natives to use in retrieving and cooking the egg. (The latter should be done in pictures, given the 25 different dialects). The quality of these added into your score (but watch out! Each color you include in your marketing materials raises the cost!)
Oh, yeah-- and we had to accomplish the task in 1 hour, in teams of 5-6 people.
It was a blast! We were allowed 2 test eggs that could be broken if early designs didn't work. Then we were given a final egg for the Official Government Demonstration. Here are pictures from the demo! (Note: Only available until Dec 15th). You can see various teams' designs. And you can see that not all the eggs survived :-).
My team was the first one shown. Our cone-shaped delivery device (OK, so it wasn't square...) landed very nearly on the target and kept the egg intact! Our marketing materials weren't top-notch, and the device wasn't so elegant, so we didn't win overall, but we did win the "Eco-Star" prize for having the most environmentally friendly design. The overall winner was the 4th device shown in the slideshow, with the striped wings.
Overall, it was a great exercise. We had to quickly get through all the team dynamics challenges, so we could settle on a design, test it, and produce marketing for it. We disregarded a lot of barriers that would normally exist, such as people's tendency to hold onto information and only share strategically to the degree that it benefits them: We shared freely and enjoyed the process. On the other hand, in "real life" we would have had access to more experts and more information instead of doing so much guesswork and hacking together of things in a somewhat sloppy way.
What fun!
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