LEARNING LAUCH for master degree program

Challenge   As the Marketing manager of a catholic University in France, I have been challenged on  creating a new master program for the Law department. So far, the Law department used to  offer 3 notorious bachelor’s degree but nothing else further. So the students had to continue  their studies in another university in France, or abroad, and were graduated by that other  establishment, which causes a major problem in terms of branding and alumni  developpement. The key idea was : why not create an international master program  specialised in Innovation ? The idea appeared lately, so we had like 4 months, on a very  small budget, to experiment the idea, organize and commercialize the program.    Selection  After the pedagogic team and the marketing team collaborated to conceive the syllabus and  a calendar of the projet , the marketing team gathered a group of 12 people studying in last  year of bachelor, which are potential customers of the future master program. Teachers  were facilitators to make a selection of boys and girls with different personalities (shy,  expressive, optimistic, sceptic…).    Application  First we tried to figure out which barriers we could face. Do we have time to launch the  project ? Is the Innovation too novator for french market of law studies ? Will the university  HR find qualified and bilingual teachers ? If so, there will be a cost for that : is there a market  for high price programs in a private university in Paris ?  The chosen strategy has been to propose an experimental short master class (one  semester) for these 12 selected students (evening and week-end time). This master class  was free of charge for students, if they engaged to make a detailed feedback and a half day  thinking session with the whole group, on which courses were interesting for them, which  were not, if they intend to complete the full program next year and what they could expect of  the teaching for a future professional life.    Insight  We were surprised by the feedback of the students. It appeared that most of them were  ready to enroll in a high price master program for the next year, and some proposed a great  idea, a specialisation in Artificial intelligence. We were thinking students will be more  interested in global innovation for business. But the group session decided us to propose a  specialization in AI, with a catholic approach of Humanities. Then the Direction took the  decision to open this program offering a pre-booking offer to the participants. 5 of the 12  students enrolled, in other words half of the minimum of participants needed.    Approach  Neither pedagogic team nor marketing team were used to collaborate so closely, and were  used to ask feedback from the students. All members of the marketing team have learned a  lot during this project. The detailed feedback of the students have taught us that we don’t  have to be afraid to test our programs before selling them, because ideas can come from  prospective students. But we may have failed in communicating the process to all pedagogic  team to encourage good practises in the heart of the university. Also, by lack of time, only  the marketing team listed the feedback questions, so maybe we missed some more precise  pedagogic information that could have been interesting for the development of the project.

