Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Could you switch gears and tell me what you see out there as open problems around which people could be starting new companies?

Patrick Mullane: That’s a broad question. I see a lot of opportunities in the job I’m in that we don’t address and I don’t see anybody addressing. One is how can we very quickly make content that’s compelling and that is custom in nature for a particular company’s needs. I’d argue for a long time, executive education programs were the domain of only large companies because it costs a lot of money to send somebody somewhere.

There certainly are huge benefits to that. I think that it’s a need that’s not going to go away, but there’s probably a whole tier of middle-market companies that don’t and won’t do that but still have a need for education. Not only that but also education that’s tailored very specifically either to their industry or to that company’s problem.

I haven’t seen anybody figure out how to create online content very quickly that’s compelling, that the company would value, and that feels very unique to that company alone. We see corporations asking for things like that quite a bit.

Sramana Mitra: Can you give an example? There’s a lot of stuff going on in corporate online learning.

Patrick Mullane: There is but almost all of it is cookie cutter. Even our stuff. We have a number of courses but those courses are meant to address a general need. They’re not specific to a particular company or industry in most cases.

If you were a company in pharmaceutical sales, and some new regulation or trade war starts that changes the way you have to do business, you want to quickly educate hundreds of thousands of people around the world in a global company. There is no easy way to do that right now. If somebody can figure out how to do that in a scalable and cost-effective way, I think there are a lot of companies that would be willing to pay for that.

Almost by definition, a customer problem is an in-the-moment problem. If you can’t solve it today, they’re not interested in talking to you. Time matters. The less time it takes you to solve a problem, the more advantage you get. Frankly, because education has been the domain of big universities which aren’t as nimble, that need still exists.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. This is getting into the domain of knowledge base creation and customer support domain. It’s a pretty large area and there’s a lot going on. I haven’t really fully dug in, but it’s a good place to go dig into. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Patrick Mullane, Executive Director of HBX
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