Press Room

Group CVC and Service Thinking in the News

• New Curriculum Prepares B-School Students For Digital Economy-

  IBM recently announced a new partnership with Hult International Business School that's driving innovation in today's higher education system and helping to close the skills gap in areas like social, analytics, mobility and cloud computing to better prepare future business leaders. Christine Crandell sat down with Jim Spohrer, IBM's Director of University Programs, to hear more about the new curriculum and its focus on today’s digital service economy.

  It’s not enough for the next generation of employees to just understand the technology. They need critical thinking and analytical skills to question, tear down and innovate new principles of leading, selling and creating value.

• MBA students offer fresh perspective on business social engagement-

  Posted by Richard Silberman in Smarter Planet Social Business.

  IBM collaborated with Hult professor Jeff Saperstein to provide a unique opportunity for students to rethink how multi-brand companies can tap into the full potential of social media. Saperstein, who teaches at Hult’s San Francisco campus, split his international marketing management classes into 15 project teams and asked each one to develop a comprehensive marketing plan with solutions to optimize a company’s use of social media.

  "When it comes to social, right now we as teachers are being reverse mentored by our students because they know a lot more about social engagement than we do,” Saperstein said. “The social world is profoundly different than traditional marketing and customer relationship building. These MBA students live in that world, so it’s important that businesses listen to them."

• Text recognition, viral videos and brand resonance: More MBA strategies for social media success-

  Posted by Richard Silberman in Smarter Planet Social Business.

  Part 2 of MBA Students Offer Fresh Perspective on Business Social Engagement.

  Describes three more projects from the competition devised by IBM and Hult International Business School professor Jeff Saperstein to define better ways for multi-brand companies to engage in social networking. Fifteen groups of students developed comprehensive marketing plans with strategies for using social media to increase brand recognition, build customer relationships and create new opportunities.

  The ideas from the Alcatraz 3, Golden Gate 4, and Coit Tower 5 teams were:

  • Use text analytics to assess customer sentiment
  • Build brand equity amongst all stakeholders
  • Create excitement with a video crowdsourcing campaign

Introduction to Service Thinking

Jeff Saperstein and Hunter Hastings explain the basic principles of Service Thinking–the framework and the book–in these two videos.

Official Photos

Feel free to use these photos when mentioning Jeff Saperstein and Hunter Hastings in your blog posts and news articles. Let us know if you need higher-resolution images for print publications. Please link the photos to http://groupcvc.com. Photo credit: “Photos by Keith Cockerham.”