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What: New market strategy leads to greater internal cooperation

The Challenge: The Museum of Science, Boston is a world-reknowned organization focused on stimulating "interest in and further understanding of science and technology and their importance for individuals and for society." The museum primary business is hosting children on school field trips and providing a place to explore for families on weekends. MoS management felt like their was an opportunity to substantially increase their ability to expose kids to science, technology and engineering in the out of school time.

My Role: I was a member of a five person Harvard Business School Community Action Partners (CAP) volunteer consulting team working on this assignment for the MoS. Traditionally CAP teams are made up of HBS alumni, but they have recently recruited KSG alumni to bring a different set of skills and perspectives to the table. Because of my extensive consulting experience and background in youth development, I was chosen specifically for this team.

Perhaps my most significant contribution on this project was my ability to empower the MoS internal team. It is generally my practice to "go inside" with a client, and in a different way from the other members of my consulting team, I played a pivotal client-facing role. The museum is in the midst of a transition. With new leadership and restructuring, much is uncertain when it comes to direction and priorities. Although we were tasked with devising a strategy for an out of school program, there were some internal issues that made defining a specific strategy difficult. The primary challenge was that there was no agreed upon framework for making decisions. Additionally, there was no central knowledge base to understand all of the vast content that the museum has to offer. As part of devising a recommendation, we had to take into account how to deal with these internal issues.

The Results: We defined three different strategies that the museum could employ to bring science, technology and engineering to kids in the after school time-frame; a proprietary in-house after school program, a providing content on a wholesale model to existing after school programs, and a mass market content distribution model. We addressed funding strategies and viability for all three options, focusing on the content wholesale model as the most attractive.

I also worked directly with the MoS programs team to design and set up a system for keeping track of their content assets, identify age and learning challenge appropriate content,

department of origin and portability. It always incorporates a "scoring" system that allows MoS team members to score content across a variety of criteria. The Museum of Science is in an important transition and our work help them set the stage for the next step in their evolution.