Working Together: How a Student-University-Organization Alliance is paying off.

            I wanted to share with you an interesting story about a new start-up company, inDegree.com. inDegree.com is a professional community that connects graduate students and alumni seeking jobs with employers searching for top talent and with universities trying to identify and connect with high-value alumni. I believe this story will be of interest to you for three reasons. First, it highlights how great things can be accomplished when students, academia and local organizations team up. Second, it sheds light on a common problem we all face in organizations: how to streamline IT services. Third, it gives some insights into how organizations can leverage new social media to create business value. 
 
1. Leveraging Connections in Tallahassee:
 
            Last year I was struggling with how to develop an alumni community so I could stay connected with my graduate students after graduation. Students from my past constantly send me emails asking if I know anybody in Atlanta, know anybody at so and so company, have insights on a good security consulting firm etc. I had started inviting students to join my LinkedIn network, but this didn’t allow students to network with other alumni, so I was essentially still the central contact and bottleneck. At the same time, one of my MBA students came to my office with the idea to create a LinkedIn-style network exclusively for graduate students. Alex was getting ready to graduate, but found that there were no job sites dedicated to people with graduate degrees and no way to leverage the FSU MBA alumni network to help in the job search. We discovered that our 2 problems could have a common solution with a mash-up of web 2.0 functionality: the job postings of LinkedIn, the social networking of Facebook, and the matching functionality of online dating sites like e-Harmony, (identifying dream jobs for students and dream candidates for employers of course, not dream dates). 
            So, a student and a professor started working together, but we needed a lot more help. I started with TalTech member Alan Hanstein who had experience with his own high-tech start-up. Alan made 2 great connections for us: Marc Paul and Richard Benham.   Marc Paul, TalTech member and founder of Paul Consulting, Inc. did the website design and programming. PCI has done a fantastic job making turning our ideas into reality. Richard Benham, last month’s TalTech speaker, lawyer and entrepreneur, provided us with legal counsel. We now have an incredibly talented group of local experts and entrepreneurs involved: Gus Ray, FSU Foundation, Office of IP and entrepreneur has helped vet the business model (last month’s TalTech speaker), Tim Holcomb, strategy professor and entrepreneur has joined our Board of Directors and Marcia Roitberg, marketing professional and media specialist joined our Board of Directors. 
 
2. Streamlining IT Services
 
            The second part of this story is about how organizations can realize significant cost savings by eliminating redundant systems. My last blog was about the telephone system being redundant with VOIP. This is just one of many redundant systems at most organizations. I didn’t understand either the career services systems or the alumni management systems until I started the market research for inDegree. Here is the typical “customer lifecycle” of a graduate student. The academic units educate the students. If students want help finding jobs, they go to the career center. Once students graduate, universities try to retain student data through the alumni associations/foundations. Students create a profile in one system to find a job, are then expected to voluntarily create a profile in a separate system to connect with the alumni association after graduation, and then have to independently try and maintain contacts with their friends and professors from the program through other means. By combining functionality through a site like inDegree, all of these services are provided through one solution, improving the level of service and eliminating expensive, redundant systems. One profile in one system to meet all student needs throughout the entire student lifecycle.  How many different systems are you maintaining with redundant information at your organization? How many different systems do your customers have to cross?
 
3. Letting your customer do the work
 
            User-generated content. This is one of the most incredible changes to the creation of value in our economy that it is worth repeating: user-generated content. Web 2.0 has transformed how value is created in our economy. We discovered that we didn’t need centralized, hierarchical organizations to manage information. Given the right tools and incentives, users voluntarily create and maintain content for other users. Users are very comfortable leveraging technologies to help themselves. Organizations are now finding that their users, customers, will serve as a volunteer workforce and provide all kinds of value. Customers contribute ideas for new innovations, serve as an online help desk and answer each other’s questions and help filter important information. Providing basic Web 2.0 connectivity tools free to users has the potential to generate a lot value and revenue. Once your customers are pushing information to your organization, there is a wealth of business intelligence you can gather directly about your customers. 
            For instance, inDegree’s business model is based on providing a platform for users to generate their own content. Content generating activities (profiles, blogs, networking, job postings etc.) are all provided FREE, because there is tremendous value in this data. Graduate students create and maintain their own profiles and have an incentive to do so (visibility to employers and keeping abreast of other students). Universities benefit from real-time data updates on their alumni, including hard to get information like employment status. But the real value is the business intelligence that can be generated from this sea of data: where are our alumni, who are the best donor prospects, what is the typical profile of our graduates, how competitive are our placements against other graduate programs etc.    
            Business models that are based on selling information (including generation, aggregation or management) need to take heed and beware, such as job sites charging employers to post job openings. Competitors are coming that will provide information services free with the goal of aggregating a critical mass of content and users. New revenue models will emerge where organizations sell value-added services and business intelligence based on the user-generated content.
 
 
Every semester I have students come to me with great business ideas, but this is the first time that I really got directly involved because it solved one of my problems. I have been very impressed with the responsiveness of the Tallahassee community and the quality of expertise here. Going forward, my goal is to leverage TalTech’s Facebook page to post student ideas and help students connect with our local resources and maybe bring more new start-ups to Tallahassee.