Case Study
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University Business School
Business Plan
One of the nation’s top-ranked undergraduate business schools piloted a summer-long program in Israel employing that country’s burgeoning tech industry as a giant classroom to teach entrepreneurship and to build international connections for students. Its founder quickly realized the potential to grow the program exponentially with other top-tier business schools; a major funder conditionally offered to back a plan to scale up.
Challenge
Elite academic institutions can be reluctant participants in programs designed and run by competing institutions so one university’s Israel entrepreneurship program could grow only with partners who saw themselves as equals in developing curriculum that offered credits they would accept, a governance model that guaranteed their central role in the program, and where tuition income would flow back to each institutions’ coffers.
Solution
Plan A Advisors facilitated a 10-month business planning process that engaged deans from an invited group of the nation’s elite undergraduate business schools in designing a dramatic expansion of the Israel program and developed a governance and financial structure for the program that met their institutional needs and requirements for students. Thirty diverse administrators, academics and funders played a role in the process.
Process
• Conducted interviews with academics and administrators to define the competitive landscape and identify prospective partners
• Led roundtable conversations with recent alumni to articulate the program’s benefits from students’ perspectives
• Tested a model for program expansion in a three-page Case for Scaling shared with prospective partners and funders including university administrators, academics and philanthropy professionals
• Gathered likely partners for a one-day session to settle on a portfolio of programs to be jointly run by an academic consortium that they would jointly run in Israel and the U.S.
• Crafted a multi-year business plan to scale-up the program including detailed program descriptions; governance and financial structure with multi-year budget projections; marketing & communications, fundraising and evaluation strategies; staffing and oversight structure, including position descriptions; and an implementation timeline
• Drafted the Memorandum of Understanding for endorsement by prospective partners