Last May, in the closing weeks of the spring semester, a team of Bryan MBA students presented a comprehensive business plan to the Center of Innovation in Interior Architecture (CIIA). The Center has struggled with realizing its vision of becoming a prestigious think tank for local industries since it was founded three years ago by the Department of Interior Architecture at UNCG.

The Bryan MBA team conducted numerous interviews and follow-up interviews with faculty and board members, gathered and reviewed an extensive amount of material, and spent countless hours working on analyses of the Center’s structure, products and services, marketing, and finances. In the end the students helped CIIA uncover a lot of hidden potential.

After reviewing CIIA’s financial situation, the Bryan MBA team provided estimates of future costs and earnings and indentified potential sources for grant funding. To maximize on the expertise and technological strengths of the Center’s staff, the students advised CIIA to focus its efforts on prototype design and building. Training contracts with manufacturers of furniture and other products were identified as another opportunity that the team recommended pursuing aggressively.

Working from an inventory analysis of the Center’s products and services, the MBA team developed a comprehensive marketing plan that identified new markets and recommended initiatives for targeting potential customers. The students also advised the Center to develop its own logo, publications, web site, and encouraged the CIAA to obtain its own office space in order to help distinguish the Center as an entity separate from the Department of Interior Architecture.

“The students did a thorough and thoughtful job and I was really impressed by the professionalism and rigor of the students. I was proud of them and I thought they represented the Bryan MBA exceptionally well,” says C. Thomas Lambeth, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Interior Architecture.

The students began working on the project back in August at the start of the 2007-08 academic year. What made this consulting project different from other consulting work that Bryan MBA students had completed in the past is that this project was conducted by first-year Bryan MBAs rather than by second-year students who already had a year of the MBA curriculum under their belt.

The project was an assignment for Pizza, Picasso, and the Pyramids: The Journey to Excellence Continues! - a two-semester course that focuses on integrating the first-year Bryan MBA experience through theory and practice.

“In order to reach a higher level of performance as MBA students and beyond, students need to feel challenged. For this project, the class was divided into small teams of four or five students and assigned complex organizations that they had to analyze in a broad context,” says Dr. Vidyaranya Gargeya, Bryan MBA Program Director and professor for the course.

“It was definitely a challenging project. We knew that a major component of the second year was consulting projects, but to be assigned a project of this size and importance in our first semester was a bit intimidating,” recalls Cory Perry, one of the students that worked on the business plan for CIIA. “In retrospect, it really prepared me for my summer internship with a consulting company.”

By the end of the summer, Cory, who interned with FMI in Arizona, had an attractive job offer. And he was not alone as many other students from his cohort had summer internships that were extended into the fall or matured into offers for permanent positions.

Dr. Gargeya reports that this summer was the most successful summer for internships since the Bryan Day MBA opened and this fall for the Pizza, Picasso, and the Pyramids course, he has arranged new consulting projects for this year’s entering class of Day MBAs.

-September 2008