Residency Week
Making an Impact on the Real World
When graduate students begin our MBA/MSA program, they hit the ground running (and climbing and swinging). One of the required experiential courses called Residency Week—a boot camp, to those who love it—is intensive, hands-on and designed to level the playing field between students from all disciplines entering the graduate program. They are immersed in intensive seminars in marketing, accounting and finance, and work with area businesses to analyze and solve problems.
This fall, one of these “live cases” involved Summit Spring Water in Harrison, Maine, one of the few single-source natural springs in the world where water is collected and bottled at the source. The challenge for the MBA/MSA students was to recommend to Summit Spring executives how to differentiate the company from competitors. Summit Spring President Bryan Pullen recalls the experience:
My experience with the MBA class was a very fruitful and enjoyable one. The class had some great ideas for my business, many of which we are implementing. Most notable was a recommendation to change the product label completely. Not a very easy or cheap thing to do, also fraught with the danger of diluting the brand and alienating your customer base.
In spite of this, after long deliberations, we felt the group was right and we redesigned the label incorporating many, if not all of the changes they sought. The new label and the response from consumers have been marvelous. It was a necessary change and has moved us forward in a big way, and it took the prodding of each team all day to convince me it was the right thing to do.
So my hats off to the class and my personal thanks for a job well done. They were under serious time constraints and pressure, much of which I helped put on them! In the end, their work was thoughtful and deliberate, with a lot of paradigm shifting, “out-of-the-box” ideas not commonplace in the industry.
Their work has helped my business; the program and time spent was a great success, in my opinion.
My thanks again to the students and staff of the MBA program.
Maine Business School Executive-in-Residence Paul Myer calls this collaboration between students and businesses a win/win.
“The Residency Week program ‘live case’ helps our students understand the knowledge and skills they need to effectively deal with the cross-functionality of business topics and issues involved in the case. The Summit Spring case was an exceptional opportunity—a dialogue with company executives that forced the students to think ‘on their feet.’ In the process, the company gained valuable insights and the experience built student confidence, helping them grow both personally and professionally,” he says.
More information on Residency Week and all of the presentations can be found on the MBA/MSA website.
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