In the digital age, businesses have access to extensive information about their customers. This information can help businesses personalize offerings and reach consumers in a way that reflects their individuality. Advances in analytics make it easier to combine information about things like preferences, shopping patterns, and sensitivity to price into useful templates for suggesting products. This seems like a win-win for both marketers, who can identify those who are most likely to want their products, and end users, who receive communications tailored specifically to them.

However, privacy is a major issue when it comes to using customer data. As more and more people share information online and breaches become more common, the importance of protecting individuals’ identity has grown. Despite trying to preserve the privacy of their customers, companies sometimes run into problems when using customer data in their marketing and advertising.

Protecting Customer Privacy is Paramount

In October 2006, Netflix offered $1,000,000 dollars to any individual or group who could figure out a way to improve its DVD recommendations to subscribers by 10% or more. It released historical data from hundreds of thousands of users (with identifying information removed) about the grades they’d given to various movies.

Although they stripped names and ID numbers from the data, many Netflix customers also used other ratings sites, such as IMDB. Comparing ratings on IMDB with those in the shared Netflix database allowed researchers to accurately determine the user’s identity. This ultimately led to an expensive legal settlement, and Netflix never implemented the winning algorithm.

It was later found that Netflix could have invested in data masking technology to avoid the issues with anonomizing the customer data. This would've cost about $50,000, a tiny amount compared to their expensive legal settlement.

Want to read more?

• Wired: Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit Claims
• Forbes: Netflix Settles Privacy Lawsuit, Cancels Prize Sequel

Content That's Too Targeted Can Miss the Mark

In 2010, Target implemented a new algorithm looking at changes in customers’ buying habits to identify women who were newly pregnant. Target was able to reach out to these women and offer them products that would be useful to them. Because pregnancy and its associated changes happen quickly, a rapid algorithm was valuable.

However, the company found itself in the middle of a scandal when it sent ads for baby products to a teenage girl living with her parents, whom she had not yet told about her condition. This story exploded over the news and social media.

How Target figured out that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did: http://t.co/bcGYQ0CHfi #forbesgreatesthits

— Forbes (@Forbes) May 26, 2013

Allow Users to Opt In

On Black Friday in 2011, two malls used a new mobile technology to track shoppers as they moved through the mall, allowing them to send location-specific alerts to customer’s phones. In addition to helping marketers target the right people, monitoring the flow of shoppers through the mall would help stores determine how to staff during the busy holiday season. Unfortunately, this was done without the knowledge or consent of shoppers.

Not only were mall visitors upset about marketers’ use of their phone, but Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) denounced the practice at a press conference. Both malls cancelled the program, which was intended to run though New Year, within a week.

Get ready to get stalked: Malls track shoppers' cell phones on Black Friday http://t.co/vkgmk7GH

— CNNTech Gadgets (@CNNTechGadgets) November 22, 2011

This example highlights the importance of allowing customers to opt-in and voluntarily provide their data to preserve their right to privacy. Rather than technology that collects data from any mall visitor who hasn’t turned off their phone, some stores are now using a similar technology, but only with customers who choose to install an app on their phone.

Key Takeaways

Customer data is a powerful tool that companies can harness to inform every facet of their business. But as the saying goes, with great knowledge comes great responsibility.

Companies must do everything they can to preserve customers' privacy, keep them informed of how their data is being used, provide consumers with options to opt in or out, and walk the fine line between serving up relevant, targeted content and turning into Big Brother.

 
Dean Nitin Nohria addresses HBX CORe students at a closing ceremony on November 2, 2014.

In the fall of 2010, just a few months after I became dean of Harvard Business School, I remember hosting a large meeting where faculty and staff could ask questions and offer feedback. I recall one question in particular: "When will Harvard Business School enter the arena of online education?”

I answered unequivocally: “Not in my lifetime.”

I was wrong, of course, and thanks to the launch of EdX and a remarkably entrepreneurial group of colleagues at HBS, we began work on the project that has become HBX. This month, as we celebrate one year since its launch—during which 4,100 students from 72 countries have experienced our courses—it’s fitting for me to reflect on why I initially misjudged the potential of online education, and why I now believe the technological and pedagogical innovations being pioneered by HBX have the ability to transform the way we teach in all of our programs at Harvard Business School.

My slow acceptance of online education was shaped by two important factors.

First, until a few years ago many of the people promoting online education positioned it as a disruptive innovation which would threaten (or even kill off) campus-based, face-to-face educational programs. While it undoubtedly is shifting the landscape of management education, my belief in the transformative power of an intimate, immersive, residential program that utilizes the case study method—a form of business education created by Harvard Business School nearly a century ago—is profound and unshakeable. The pervasive framing of online education as a threat caused me to react defensively; once I changed my mindset, and began to see it as a supplement and complement to existing educational methods, my attitudes began to change.  My colleagues and I started to view it as an exciting opportunity to extend and enhance our mission rather than as a threat to our survival.

The second factor that limited my imagination was the experience I’d had sampling online courses as they existed in 2010. I had explored the first generation of MOOCs and was unimpressed. After twenty-five years of teaching via the case study method, I prefer deeply interactive classroom discussions to lectures—and uploading videotaped lectures and problem sets into an online setting seemed to me a poor alternative. But as my colleagues and I began to brainstorm how we might bring our engaging case method pedagogy into an online setting, my views changed. I sometimes use the analogy that if someone examined a mobile phone in 1985—when the contraption was the size of a small suitcase—he or she might dismiss the long-term appeal of this transformational technological innovation. Likewise, once I realized how dramatically a team of Harvard Business School faculty and staff could improve on existing methods for online education, I realized that my view had been mistaken, too.

I am enormously proud of the courses that my colleagues at HBX have created. They have found ways to replicate the intimacy and interactivity of the case study method in an online environment, and they have pushed the technology in imaginative ways (and continue to do so). I am eager to watch as they continue to innovate and expand. There is no question that they have delivered on the initial idea: that HBX could extend the mission and reach of Harvard Business School, just as our Executive Education programs and Harvard Business Publishing allow us to deliver teaching and research to thousands of people beyond those who pursue a Harvard MBA.

Our HBX CORe offerings liberate undergraduates to major in subjects of their choosing but still have access to a high-quality introduction to business fundamentals, and they allow companies to hire people without business backgrounds by ensuring new employees have the ability to quickly and efficiently learn the basics in a cost-effective manner. HBX, and HBX Live in particular, also help us to deliver on our promise of lifelong learning, by giving us new way to reach and interact with students and alumni as their careers and educational needs evolve.

Perhaps the biggest surprise that’s come out of HBX is how it is beginning to affect our thinking about the best way to teach live classes utilizing the case study method. Just as lecture-based programs are putting lectures online to “flip the classroom” and deepen in-class discussion, we are exploring ways to use the technologies and methods pioneered by HBX to allow pieces of what we now do in our case discussions to take place online before class, opening up time for a richer classroom experience.

For example, we are exploring ways to use HBX technology to enhance the way we present technical or analytically complex materials before students come to class, freeing professors from the whiteboard and allowing students to master these concepts at a pace that is personally comfortable. In Executive Education, HBX Live has already been put to use in modular programs when participants are not in residence and are distributed all over the globe.

I can’t—and won’t—predict what HBX might look like in the future. I have humility, because I was wrong about online education in the past, and I don’t want to be wrong again. But I have no doubt HBX will continue to be a powerful new vehicle for us to advance our mission of educating leaders who make a difference in the world, and at all stages of their lives.

Five years after I said “not in my lifetime,” I now believe that HBX could easily be one of the most important initiatives we undertake at Harvard Business School.

This post is a part of our HBX Year One series celebrating the one year anniversary of the public launch of HBX. View all of our HBX Year One posts here. 

Photo courtesy of StarPilot Productions LLC

We are used to creating and launching new educational programs at Harvard Business School. After all, we’ve been doing it for over one hundred years. Yet, when we launched HBX one year ago it was new for us in three respects. First, the courses we offered (HBX CORe, our “fundamentals of business” program, and Disruptive Strategy) were entirely online – something we’d never done before. Second, HBX CORe was offered to a set of learners – undergraduates and non-business graduate students – who we had never served before. Third, the courses were offered on a platform that was entirely new and built from scratch for this purpose.  

We’ve never really had to reinvent all three attributes - a new group of learners, a new “classroom” infrastructure, and a new medium – for a program before. And that’s why we approached the launch of HBX with great excitement, but also great humility.  

The HBX journey itself started even before that - nearly three years ago. Online education was not familiar to us then. It is also fair to say that it was not something most of us felt would seriously impact, or disrupt, our campus programs anytime soon. Yet, we decided to embark on this journey.  

We did so because of the possibilities; because we were passionate about trying to re-imagine participant-based learning online; and because of our mission - to train and educate leaders who make a difference in the world.

Creating The HBX Learning Model 

Education is a right. Great education is a privilege that many of us have benefited from in our lives. There were a few simple observations that shaped our efforts at HBX to create a great educational experience online. We believe that education – in any form – can and should be engaging and interactive. That’s the best way to challenge one’s assumptions and beliefs, to learn new and unfamiliar material, and to force one to think. We also believe that education is a social experience, not just an individual one. It’s an experience where we learn with and from others, from teachers and, as importantly, from our peers.  

This map shows the geographic distribution of CORe learners for our June 2015 cohort

Those beliefs led us to create an online platform for HBX with many idiosyncratic features. A global map – so that learners could see who else was online. Shared reflections – so they could read how others were processing the same material. Peer help – so they could ask, or answer, questions of others. Real-time updating. Drag and drop exercises. Interactive games. Online cold calls. And many more features. One important rule of thumb we followed was that a learner shouldn’t go by for more than three to five minutes without “doing something” on the platform.  

To create the courses, we borrowed from a teaching approach that we know best: the case method. This was the inspiration for the three principles - storytelling, interactive learning, and social learning – that anchored HBX.  

But while we were borrowing, we also tried, equally hard, to forget what makes our classroom approach work so well. We knew that if we tried to simply reproduce our classroom approach online, we would miss the mark. This was the basis for the “digital-first” philosophy at HBX that has come to define everything we do here. It’s not an idea that we invented. It’s one that we took learnt from the recent history of sectors like media and entertainment, where companies have been trying to digitally transform themselves (and often struggled).  Digital-first is a simple idea - leverage the digital medium for what it is, rather than merely trying to transfer a traditional format online. But it’s one that’s often gone unheeded in online education.  

A Team Effort

Our early conversations involved a handful of HBS faculty and staff. An initiative like HBX, however, doesn’t get created without the incredible efforts of many: our Dean, the rest of the founding faculty team (Jan Hammond, Youngme Moon, VG Narayanan, and Clay Christensen), and our staff team – some drawn from HBS, and several others who simply shared our passion for contributing to something meaningful and creative.  

Finally, there are the HBX learners: more than 4,000 of them in year one for HBX CORe, coming from over 450 universities, and 72 countries; over a dozen cohorts of learners for Disruptive Strategy. The group of learners has been incredibly diverse. (To quote one learner’s description, “their path to HBX is something you would usually find in a Tom Hanks movie”). They’ve been humorous, they’ve been grateful. They’ve given generous feedback, which has been invaluable as we continue to refine and innovate on everything we do. They have brought engagement, passion, and a remarkable sense of collaboration to the HBX learning experience in a way we never imagined. They’ve been pioneers as well in our online journey. We owe a deep gratitude to all of them.  

Some Highlights from Year One

There are several moments that I personally remember well from our first year at HBX. There was the day we opened our website for applications – and wondered whether anyone would sign up for a paid online program on a platform they’d never seen or heard of before. There was the activity on the first day that we launched CORe (June 11, 2014), when over 300 participants uploaded their profile pictures and information, generating over 13,000 profile views. (It turns out that they really just wanted to check each other out).  There was the end of that first day when, at around 9 pm, we noticed that one learner - a Harvard biology major - had, incredibly, completed the first module for all three CORe courses. At around the same time, she reached out with an email to us, describing the reason behind her marathon stretch on the platform that day: “it is so hard to tear myself away from the modules”, she wrote. “Thank you for creating such an amazing experience.” That was probably the first moment we felt that HBX might actually work.  

Finally, there’ve been the results so far: 85% completion rates for our courses. Engagement scores for our online courses that are similar what we experience in many of our residential programs. What we’ve learnt is not just that online engagement can be very high. Many of these online experiences are now translating, remarkably, into offline ones. Students are organizing meet-ups in different cities. They are forming study groups. Some are looking to collaborate with peers on new ventures. They are getting to know each other in ways we had hoped for, but could not envision.  

These experiences have made something else clear to us that we did not believe three years ago: learning through the online medium is surely not destined to be an inferior experience to the classroom medium. The combination of technology and creative pedagogy can spawn remarkable engagement and experiences there too.  

Starting A Journey

This fall, for the first time, more than 300 of our matriculating MBA students will have experienced learning through HBX before they arrive on campus. A month ago, for the first time, some of our alumni experienced HBX Live, our innovative studio that enables case discussions at a distance. We are looking to integrate HBX offerings and platforms into our existing executive education programs, and into our traditional channels for disseminating research. Our faculty colleagues are creating new courses. Our alumni are eager to see what we are doing with technology in rethinking teaching and learning. It’s only been a year, but it’s clear that the impact of these efforts on our own campus will grow over time.  

This probably shouldn’t have been surprising to any of us. Technology, after all, is just an enabler. It’s a means, not an end. And what we’ve learnt so far is that it can be a powerful enabler of learning, of teaching, and of research – indeed, of nearly everything we do in a university.  

Year one of HBX has been a real roller-coaster ride. The astonishing, and sobering, part of it all is that we are probably far closer to the starting point than the finish line in the story of how technology might revolutionize education.  

We hope that our efforts at HBX will ultimately transform the educational experience of everyone who comes to our campus to learn. We also hope that our efforts can touch and impact new learners around the world who might never set foot on our campus. More than anything, we hope that the educational experiences we are delivering through HBX impacts learners not just through the content being offered there, but by serving as a springboard for new ideas, creative solutions, and better things – a springboard that enables our learners to make a difference in the world.

This post is a part of our HBX Year One series celebrating the one year anniversary of the public launch of HBX. View all of our HBX Year One posts here. 

Photo courtesy of StarPilot Productions LLC

Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise (BSSE), based on the teachings of Clayton M. Christensen, is one of the most popular courses at Harvard Business School. The HBX team was thrilled to work with Clay to develop an online version of his course, Disruptive Strategy with Clayton Christensen, as the first offering from HBX Courses. 

Since launching in June 2014, organizational teams from more than 25 companies have taken the course and used it to help solve their most difficult strategic challenges. 

Initially, Willy Shih and Chet Huber, who teach BSSE with Clay and helped develop Disruptive Strategy, wondered whether HBX could replicate the live, interactive HBS classroom experience in an online platform. 

"I have been amazed at how well it seems to work," said Huber. "While I’m not sure anything can beat a live discussion, the combination of mini-lectures, video cases and interactive sessions do a great job – and have some unique advantages. Tailoring the material to a firm’s unique situation, and engaging each student individually (including cold calls) is something I wish I could do with 90 students in a classroom."

"The thing that shocked me on Disruptive Strategy was the idea that the HBX product had the potential to be BETTER than the classroom product," Shih added.  "It’s a comprehensive, scalable way to simultaneously bring our BSSE material to life for an entire organization, mapped across their unique competitive situation."

For John Woodson, Assistant Director of Disruptive Strategy, the response from early participants has been a huge motivator. "I heard from a recent participant that Disruptive Strategy was one of the top three executive education programs he has ever been apart of," he said. "The impact the course is having on organizations like athenahealth and Intuit has been rewarding to see." 

The range of companies that were able to benefit from the program in the first year shows the potential for HBX to reach a wider audience and allow more organizations to put Clay's theories into practice. 

“I put [my content] on the HBX platform because if I don’t do that, then every year at maximum 900 people will be exposed to the theories," Christensen said. "...and many more people need to have access.” 

Here are some of the highlights from the first year of HBX Courses:

This post is a part of our HBX Year One series celebrating the one year anniversary of the public launch of HBX. Don't miss our other infographics on HBX, CORe, and Live! 

As a Product Manager for HBX, I have the good fortune to work with Clayton Christensen, an expert on strategy, innovation, and growth. 

Professor Christensen’s MBA course Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise is the most popular elective at Harvard Business School and is based on his book The Innovator’s Solution, the sequel to the enormously impactful The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Having written more than nine books on disruption and innovation, Clay has also founded a nonprofit institute, a consulting firm, and a boutique investment firm – all focused on disseminating his research and ideas on innovation.  With such a large global presence, one would think that Clay Christensen wouldn’t need any more help scaling his ideas. 

However, last year, the team at HBX worked diligently with Clay to produce and launch the first ever HBX Course: Disruptive Strategy with Clayton Christensen.  We recently caught up with Clay and asked why he chose to put his content online, even after seeing success with his other initiatives.  The answer was two-fold and (not surprisingly) mirrors Clay’s very own theories.

Creating maximum exposure

According to Clay, online learning can scale in a way that no other type of learning can. Harvard Business School is a selective and expensive graduate program that only benefits 900 students per year; and even then there are enough seats in Clay’s course for only a third of them. 

As Clay explained, “I put [my content] on the HBX platform because if I don’t do that, then every year at maximum 900 people will be exposed to the theories…and many more people need to have access.”

By using the HBX platform as a digital thoroughfare, the theories of disruption, innovation, and successful strategic growth no longer need to be exclusive and can now help organizations that are both large incumbents in need of change, but also small and agile that may not be able to afford a consulting session. 

Reaching new audiences

By leveraging the reach of the internet, Clay’s theories can now be consumed by organizations in distant locales that don’t have access to conferences and speaking events. While Clay often travels, HBX Disruptive Strategy can travel to any place in the world that has electricity and an internet connection, thus opening up new markets for this high level educational content.

In fact, one of HBX’s most recent cohorts is a small nonprofit organization in Lagos, Nigeria called West Africa Vocational Education (or WAVE).  WAVE’s mission is to tackle youth unemployment in West Africa, and they believe that Clay’s theories will help them execute on their mission in a much more effective and sustainable way, making a much larger impact on their community.

Clay agrees: “Managers will be much more successfully innovative if they take this course. If they don’t take the course, either they have to try to be successfully innovative by trial and error, or listen to opinions of where the market is going.  But there is no data that can guide [them] as [they] look into the future. Having a theory to guide you gives a tremendous advantage.”

The power of collective learning

One might argue that with so many copies in print and the tremendous growth of online retailers like Amazon.com, Clay’s books would be able to reach many more people, and thus be the vehicle to scaling his theories.  However, a book cannot capture the power of collective learning, particularly when the theories are needed by a team that is aiming to execute on difficult strategic change. 

Clay is cognizant that when someone reads his book, they don’t always describe his theories in the best way. And then, like a game of telephone, the theories become distorted and lose their effectiveness as each person tells the next. 

As Clay puts it, “I thought of myself as writing to millions of people, but I have realized that’s the wrong way to frame things. Because what I write is consumed individually by individual people who have a book or an article…everybody else on the team didn’t learn that way of thinking about the problem. Your readers are your resellers of the ideas; [and through] the process of selling and reselling, the idea just loses its momentum.”         

Small group dynamics

“The ideas are consumed by a group – and that’s when you come up with a new idea.  There’s a whole cadre of people who understand the same concepts, [have] the same language and together they can teach everyone else [with] much more fidelity…and a consistent lens.”      

We too believe that by utilizing our online platform and the technologies that are available to us, Clay’s timeless theories will have their maximum impact. We look forward to helping companies far and wide refine their strategies and implement innovative thinking.