Monday, January 11, 2010

A case of digital revolution


Case studies are a favourite teaching tool of many business schools as a way of delivering their message to their MBA students. Case writers are always on the look out for topical events which can be used to illustrate the changing face of business.

A recent case study by Spanish academic Josep Valor (above), who was inspired by Sports Illustrated’s digital venture, is now being taught in Iese Business School’s MBA programme. It is being used to illustrate how the current digital, technological revolution is changing the face of traditional business models

The case centres on the US sports magazine, which in 1997 moved online. Eleven years later in the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, a debate over whether US swimmer Michael Phelps won the final of the 100m butterfly was, in part, settled by Sports Illustrated photographs, taken by a fixed underwater camera. The pictures showed the US swimmer touching the finish a fraction of a second ahead of Serbian contestant Milorad Cavic.

Pundits, bloggers and other news services linked their commentary on the event to the sequence, amplifying the magazine’s decisive role in the post-match debate.

For Prof Valor - and many at the magazine - that polemic served to vindicate Sports Illustrated’s decision a decade earlier to go online and was the inspiration for the professor and Sandra Sieber, associate professor of information systems, and a team from Iese Business School to document the magazine’s experience as a case study for MBA students.

Prof Valor, associate dean and expert in information systems at the school, says he chose the magazine partly because it was an easily recognisable brand.

“We didn’t want to be spending time and energy introducing the business to students,” he says.

More important however, was the strategy adopted by the magazine and its decision to enter the digital fray in a joint venture with CNN, its sister Time Warner news service and produce topical commentary and photos, shorter articles, video feeds and new media features.


Source : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9e033bfe-fc74-11de-bc51-00144feab49a.html

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