MATT:

Welcome to Evenings at IUPUI – an audio journey that dives deep into the culture of the top-ranked Kelley School of Business, so you can explore if our part-time, Evening MBA Program is right for you. We understand enrolling in a rigorous MBA program like ours takes careful consideration, planning, and commitment. That’s why we’re pulling back the curtain and sharing how we help you build expertise, executive presence, and lasting career momentum. Are you ready?

--NAT SOUND: Chatter —

6PM comes quick after finishing a hard day at the office – especially this Wednesday night. As you make your way into the classroom, following a busy day at the office, you’re greeted by the vibrant conversations your peers bring, as everyone shares the highs and lows of their workday. Seamlessly, a welcoming voice disrupts the chatter to introduce tonight’s topic – Uber’s innovation that’s disrupting global economies.

--NAT SOUND: “What are consumers going to do?” –

Kyle:

I love using Uber as an example of market disruption in my classes…

Matt:

Tonight, Kyle Anderson, a business economics professor at the Kelley School of Business, kicks off his Evening MBA Global Economics course by discussing Uber’s disruptive innovation. Let’s get back in the classroom, and listen in…

Kyle:

You have the taxi market that was largely unchanged for 100 years. But it didn’t work particularly well – it was heavily regulated, oftentimes expensive, quality was often poor, and the service wasn’t great. You had to go out on the streets, hope to wave down a cab, have little information about the quality of that cab or driver, pay prices set by the city, and hope you weren’t ripped off. Along comes Uber with a relatively simple platform that works on your smart phone, and it solves all of the problems of taxis – rides come right to you, the app allows drivers to be rated to help ensure quality, you have a map to make sure you are taken on the best route, and prices are set ahead of time based on supply and demand. Consumers love it and start using it all the time. Five years ago, taxi licenses in NYC were selling for more than $1 million per license. Now they sell for less than $200,000. This means that over a billion dollars of value was wiped out in New York City alone by Uber, Lyft and ride-sharing services. And it is not just the taxi market – parking garages are getting less business and there is evidence that people are less inclined to buy cars. Many markets are being impacted and managers are having to shift their business models. Meanwhile, it is not clear that Uber is even a viable business – they are not profitable, drivers aren’t very happy, and the stock price is lower than when they went public in 2019. So why is this a success story? Because consumers have benefitted greatly from this new model. Ridership is high, people aren’t driving when they go out drinking at night. Technological innovation and a new business model are disrupting various industries downstream. And it will continue – what happens if/when self-driving ride-hailing vehicles are available? Will we even own cars? How will houses, commuting patterns, all aspects of our daily lives change? There is a company in Chicago that is anticipating that the demand for parking garages will be so low, that they want to use manufactured housing to create affordable housing communities inside of existing parking garages. These are the issues that economists like myself love to explore and they are the issues that every manager will face in the coming years and decades. The digital innovation that we are seeing now will disrupt virtually every market, and great managers need to be prepared to deal with it.

MATT:

Professor Anderson’s discussion of Uber reveals how disruption changes the way we think, behave, and do business. Disruptors are innovators, and innovators are makers and builders. That’s why innovation is central to the Kelley School of Business. To explain further is our dean, Idie Kesner, who addresses innovation and the culture of the Kelley School.

IDIE:

At the very heart of Kelley's DNA is innovation. We practice it, it is in the heart of everything we do, it's a part of every aspect of our mission. And I would go in even further - when you think about a business school, we often times talk about the three pillars of a business school, or the three legs of the stool. We talk about research, we talk about teaching, and we talk about service. Think about how innovation touches each and every one of those legs of the stool - research in entrepreneurship and innovation is at the heart of what the Kelley School does, we're well-known for that. We bring innovation in the classroom, both through our curriculum, through the individual courses that we teach, and the way that we teach those courses, the pedagogical tools that we use. And then, we're all about service here, but it's service that's very innovative that gives real-world solutions, whether it's social entrepreneurial firms, or for-profit firms, we're always out there looking for solutions, innovative solutions that will help those firms. So you know, when you think about what a school is all about, research, teaching, and service, innovation transcends every one of those three legs of the stool for us. When you’re training students to be innovators, you’re training them to think about innovation as a skill that they need to develop. And of course you have to explain the reasons why it is so important. The students have to have the fundamentals, so it's absolutely critical they understand the key fundamentals or functional areas of business, and develop good content and knowledge around that, because you have to be constantly monitoring your environment, thinking about the conditions, and asking lots of questions about how can I think more innovatively about my next role that I'm going to play, or the next product I'm going to bring out, or the next service that I'm going to offer? And then you move from the fundamentals to asking pivotal question: what if this changes? What if our population composition changes? What if our economic conditions change? What if tastes change, consumer tastes change? Then once you ask those questions, then you can begin looking at how could I create new, innovative products or services, that respond to those changes that are going to happen in the future. So a solid business education is an absolute necessity to anyone who aspires to be innovative in their skills, or entrepreneurial in their practice.

MATT:

At the Kelley School of Business on the IUPUI campus in downtown Indianapolis, tracking and influencing the business environment is what we do every day. Located just blocks from Fortune 500 companies and the State Capital, our team of renowned faculty use their expertise to solve  real-world business problems – turning Indianapolis into your living textbook. In order to drive innovation, the Evening MBA learning experience comes from the front lines of business practice, as our Associate Dean Phil Powell explains…

PHIL:

Our industries are changing faster than we can cognitively recognize - it's not only true for hi-tech, but it's true for grocery stores, it's true for real estate, it's true for higher ed. And in higher education, especially at a state university, we have an obligation to fulfill. That obligation is to help people walk into the vision that they have for themselves when they start, but also to align that vision with good career opportunity, career opportunity that also has positive social impact. But if we're going to give value to our community, and we're going to give value to our graduates, we have to teach our students to fail fast, fail often, and fail forward. We actually need to teach our students to celebrate failure. We need to teach our students not to be ossified in the way they think; we need to teach our students not to paralyze themselves with too much analysis that when they have an employee, that it's their job to inspire that employee and help that employee live to their potential. In the heart of downtown Indianapolis, that really defines our comparative advantage - it defines the epicenter of our ability to create value, and really change the national conversation on how a world-class business school delivers management education in a thriving metropolitan area. If you ask me sort of what we do from IUPUI, we really have a chance here to change a community, and touch it in a way that we can't do in Bloomington. Not everybody who comes through our doors is going to want to stay in Indianapolis, so it's sort of generating value for Indianapolis and beyond. I tell people that we're not doubling down on the advantages of location just to be a regional player, we're doubling down on location because we can blur the line between classroom, city, and workplace. Being downtown, you can weave your experience at work with your experience in the classroom, either online or sitting in your traditional classroom building. What that does is that accelerates your ability to be a great manager, because we had an associate dean one time talk about that said to treat your work like a classroom, and the classroom like a workplace. Basically the message was when you come to class, have the discipline to learn, and then when you go to work, sort of use work as your laboratory. And what that does is, that allows you to...you almost have a living, working laboratory - you weave experience with knowledge and theory, and it accelerates your executive learning.

MATT:

Back to the classroom – our Evening MBA students discover that Kelley’s culture of innovation influences how you learn core business principles and build areas of expertise through hands-on experiences. Assistant Professor of Operations Management (AM-roo AWAY-shee) explains why his course, W-523 – Business Innovation and Disruptive Technology is so important to our Evening MBA students.

AMROU:

How do you teach someone innovation? I never really thought about that hard about myself until I knew some of my colleagues: how do you teach corporate strategy, or how do you teach entrepreneurship? It's the same idea, well how do you teach innovation? It's understanding the basic core concepts of this is what companies have done to innovate. This course comes in at the end of core, the core classes, so students understood the functional areas--the different functional areas of the business - operations, finance, accounting, marketing, so you understand what happens in mature industries and what's happening in companies! And our goal in this course is to bring that all together. Think of it in two ways: how do you bring innovation into a mature company, and into a mature industry, and then how do you start on something new? I was an entrepreneur before I came back to business school and studied to get my PhD, and I always tell students that are thinking about going out and working or they wanna have a startup, it's very easy to have an idea. I can have fifty ideas by the end of the week of great business ideas, they're wonderful. I'm sure all of our students are filled with great ideas, but an idea is different than a successful business. These are some of the concept we bring, how do you innovate and take this concept, this thought that you might have in your mind to something that is actually real? Understanding the current landscape, understanding the current companies that are in play, understanding your suppliers, and what you can do, and then bringing that forward to something that can actually be made and then sold. That's really what we're trying to help people to think. How do we get people to develop a mindset of thinking about things that simply don't exist now when they're going through the process? We're not teaching today, and in this class, that's important, we're not teaching what is innovation today. No, we're giving you a toolset, another tool that you can have in your toolkit that you get throughout the MBA program of here is how I can think innovatively, here is a model, a framework I can use to understand how things are changing over the years, here's where things might be 5, 10 years. That's the reason for an MBA. That's why people come back to school for their Masters in Business Administration.

MATT:

When you have a vision for your future, you want your future to start as soon as possible. Why wait any longer?

Our students are prepared for any opportunity—because the Kelley Evening MBA is a degree with impact. It starts with you and surges through the dynamic, innovative connections you’ll make with peers, renowned Kelley faculty and alumni, and business leaders who are driving Indiana’s global economy.

That’s why we are the top ranked part-time MBA in the state. Take action now to propel your career. Click the link on this page to explore how the Kelley Evening MBA will help you build expertise, executive presence, and lasting career momentum.