Blocks goes to UCLA California for MBA GAP program

Blocks, SCT’s web based marketing tool get a taste of the US market.

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Blocks, SCT’s web based marketing tool get a taste of the US market.

Having been awarded a COMET [commercialisation of emerging technology] Grant in Australia, our COMET advisor Bob Beaumont saw benefit for us to apply for the GAP program at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, California.

After interviewing with a bunch of companies world wide, Blocks was selected along with 30 other diverse companies.

GAP is the fully employed MBA program at UCLA’s Anderson School of business and looks to companies who are considering the prospect of taking a product of service to the US market. These companies then become a ‘real life’ case study for the students to research, and write an investment style business plan.

Companies pay $15K USD and are given 5 or 6 fully employed MBA students as their team. These students are briefed by the company executives at the 1st of 2 meetings in LA and then go about researching and testing the market opportunity for the company. Each student must complete 30 odd hours of primary and secondary research including, in our case, 2 trips to Australia to speak with our clients in 2 states at their expense. The result of this research is an investment style business plan and a panel discussion at UCLA in December. The panel is hand picked, and in our case included 2 Angel capital firms and a representative from Google product development. The panel discussion is the opportunity for the team to be quizzed on their research and findings with help determine their marks.

So how was the experience?

I believe any experience that forces some ’stargazing’ and ‘time out’ has to be positive. We had a great team comprising of a good mix of skills, finance, sales and marketing. I had some frustrations explaining the product benefit [which of course is a problem] and without a demo of our product our key strength of ‘usability’ was never relayed in the research. It also meant the product was being compared directly to CMS products which was never our intention, even if appropriate. I enjoyed the interaction with like minded intelligent folk and have made some connections if not friends that show promise for future interaction.

And the result!

Our product is dam hard to describe and we need to define ourselves better in terms of either being a consultancy or product. We are now undergoing some interesting and informed discussion with the benefit of GAP on ‘where next’.

Watch this space…