CIP Projects Spring 2023

This sponsor’s product area is committed to fostering disruptive innovation in order to sustain its competitiveness and capture profitable growth beyond its core business. This project will research leading management theories and best practices in corporate innovation, to develop a more effective strategies for identifying and capturing growth opportunities in disruptive innovation. By studying successful cases of disruptive innovation, this product area aims to learn key differences in approaches and apply those insights to its own corporate innovation program design. Students with knowledge/experience in corporate innovation/entrepreneurship, design thinking and management consulting, are well-suited for this project.

As younger generations enter the workforce, legacy communication channels are becoming less effective at capturing employees’ attention and managing corporate culture. Our sponsor is considering implementing Microsoft Viva Engage and wants to understand the overall impact and value of this enterprise-wide change. To do this, the project will research how successful companies have implemented corporate social media, understand the key components that drive successful implementations, compare these to the Microsoft Viva Engage platform, advise on its positioning and value, and assess its impact on corporate culture. Students with expertise in social science, communications, product management, and technology, as well as experience with design thinking, are well-suited for this project.

COVID-19, supply chain snarls and persistent inflation have applied an unprecedented degree of pressure to margins of nonprofit healthcare organizations. They need to find ways to diversify revenue streams and ensure a positive margin without sacrificing patient. As a result, this project focuses on identifying and exploring new and diverse revenue opportunities for our sponsor. Students with a business planning or a consulting background as well as an interest in healthcare system, may be better suited for this project.

As the Philadelphia economy grows, biomanufacturing positions will be in high demand. This project aims to understand the current capacity of the city in attracting talents for biotech companies and develop innovative strategies (e.g., training initiatives) to create pipelines for these positions with an equity perspective. By ensuring that all residents have access to these opportunities, you can help create game-changing opportunities for Philadelphians.

The new normal of hybrid/remote work has exposed the limitations of traditional workplace tools and practices. While short-term productivity may improve, long-term creativity, innovation, employee engagement and team bonding may suffer. Metaverse workspaces, with their immersive communication and collaboration capabilities, offer a potential solution. This project explores options for metaverse workspace deployment and aims to provide a model for businesses to understand and evaluate these options.

With an aim to serve 100 million customers by 2030 and make their lives easier through its user-friendly platform and variety of financial products, this sponsor is planning to expand into Brazil, the largest country in Latin America. By building new products for the Brazil market, our sponsor can address a massive, underserved population and make a greater impact in Latin America. This project will research the market supply, demand, and competition landscape in Brazil; the financial products being offered and their pain points; and the regulatory and compliance requirements for these products.

The future of the retail industry is rapidly changing, driven by shifts in consumer preferences, technological disruption, transformation of the workforce, and geopolitical instability. This project aims to investigate the strategic role and opportunities for retail companies, their customers, and investors by identifying emerging trends in the industry and their impact over the next 10-20 years. Key considerations include the cost-of-living crisis and its impact on discretionary spending, the rise in interest rates and their impact on disposable income, and the increasing digital dependency of consumers. By understanding these trends, our sponsor would like to help their client to more effectively address industry-wide risks and more successfully navigate the changing landscape.

The sponsor formed Customer Innovation Team recently to uncover innovation opportunities for the company and its clients. Specifically, the goal is to focus on future opportunities to assist its clients with their long-term goals, while looking for opportunities that the company can add to its portfolio. The project will research the potential impact of opening an innovation lab at the sponsor with the support of data on product portfolio, use cases, and potential innovation opportunities at the sponsor.

The sponsor is interested in identifying new products in agricultural categories that involve low capex and use its product (a chemical compound). The project will focus on industrial end use cases and consider the scale at which the firm normally operates. In particular, the sponsor is interested in identifying smaller US-based companies that may benefit from setting up manufacturing in India and explore potential business models such as joint ventures or licensing agreements with such companies. The project will involve understanding the industry, defining segments, and creating linkages around potential international joint ventures.

This global telecom company has launched a co-innovation program which is largely a workshop model aimed at identifying customer needs and priorities around their digitization strategy and positioning the firm’s products/ solutions/ Innovative ideas to solve these use cases. The project aims to identify co-innovation areas / innovative use cases for retail and BFSI industry verticals which the firm can leverage in these workshops. In addition to research on the future of these industries, the team would work with the Mack Institute to leverage existing customers to identify focus areas and use cases that would be pertinent for the company to solve.

The autonomous vehicle market is a high-entry barrier segment, barring companies without sufficient funds or technological background from entering the market. Especially to develop full-stack solutions, startups raised billions of dollars to develop the underlying technology. Yet, the mass adoption of autonomous vehicles seemed to be realized in the long-term future. The autonomous vehicle market suffered from unrealistic expectations in the past caused by unmet promises to deliver mature technology and deployment. This resulted in a need for transparency and experience/knowledge sharing, which manifested itself in the statements made by the leaders of the domain, hinting collaboration and transparency are required to get autonomous vehicle technology on the roads.

Deliverables: 

• Assessment of the existing economic models for comparable offerings in the marketplace
• Priority GTM programs for the first year of implementation and phased strategy for growth based on raising external startup funding/investment
• Value propositions to different stakeholders and decision maker/influencer map