Network Activities

Case Studies in Service Innovation: Two day conference: June 14th/15th 2010

Case studies in Service Innovation > Workshop Descriptions

Business Case Study Using Narrative Approach with MANGA Texts

Hideo Yamamoto, Chuo University yamamoto@tamacc.chuo-u.ac.jp
Atsushi Yoshikawa, Tokyo Institute of Technology at_shushi_bar@dis.titech.ac.jp
Akiko Orita, Keio University  ako@sfc.keio.ac.jp
Mikako Ogawa, Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology mogawa@kaiyodai.ac.jp
Takao Terano, Tokyo Institute of Technology terano@dis.titech.ac.jp

MANGA texts have become new story entertainment media, and they also have potentials for new medium for those with different cultures on communication, education and understandings of complex situations of business situations. In order to enrich business education, we are developing business cases with MANGA textbooks. The textbooks are also useful for service innovation domains. 

One of the most important goals for such case studies is to acquire how to integrate their knowledge and experience when learners face with a serious situation. So that what is really needed  is to learn how to make decision in any situations, based on both tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Especially, it is difficult but important to inherit experiences of failure. We focused on the narrative approach to simulate actual situations. To make the narrative story more effective, we adopted “MANGA”, Japanese term stands for comic or cartoon. Our former trials showed that MANGA has potential to express complex contexts without explicit description so that it MANGA is effective for arousing awareness [1].

The objectives of the proposed workshop are 1) to introduce our idea and method to educate and entertain students with interests in various business situations, 2) to let them experience our MANGA cases, 3) to explore the availability of the new  media or tools for professional education  in the area, and 4) to apply the method in service innovation education domains.

We prepare a MANGA textbook: Website Burning [2].  The story is as follows:  A venture company providing a hosting service and an online community that holds Word-Of-Mouth on popular restaurants suddenly faced with Web flaming problem resulting from a server having gone down. Three people, the president, the chief engineer, and the marketing executive, have different standpoints for expansion of the company. The communication gaps among them causes critical situation.

Attendees are required to read MANGA at the workshop, then join our group discussion about the relationship among the case and service innovation topics. After the discussion, we give a presentation explaining our concept of MANGA-case as a new trial of Case-Method teaching.

The workshop is anticipated to take 1.5 hours .including; Presentations, Introduction to MANGA approach -MANGA- case discussion, and Discussion on MANGA cases.

References
[1] H.Yamamoto, A.Yoshikawa, M.Ogawa and A.Orita, “A Framework for Advanced Case-Method Training using Manga Textbook”, Journal of the International Association of Project & Program Management, Vol.3, No.2, pp.87-95, 2009.
[2]  Yoshikawa, A., et al.: MANGA Text: Website Burning (Translated from Japanese version), 2010.