Day 5: Market Research & Innovation

Day 5. May 30, 2007

At 7:00 AM, we reviewed individual performance from yesterday’s session at Lexus. We began Day 5 with a session on Market Research lead by Dr. Furse and Ms. Kutka from the Walker Library. The teams focused on database searches for the Lexus project.

At 9:30 AM, Ms. Pace worked with the teams on Personal Branding (pre-presence, presence, post-presence). She also assisted the Accelerator teams in preparing for MAPCO presentations scheduled for Friday AM.

At 11:00 AM, the teams met to finalize their MAPCO presentations for delivery to the Accelerator management for review.

Team 5 (Reif, Taylor, Zhang, Kemph, Hennessey, Smith, Aro, Denman and Daugherty) completed their presentation 1st and chose to present last on Friday.
Team 2 (Patton, Taylor, Lindsay, Reese, Ledlow, Clayton, Dornfeld, Jaimes, Sindel) completed 2nd and chose to present 4th on Friday AM.
Team 3 (Watson, Gottfried, Grumney, McGill, Shafer, Carpenter, Kierstead, Puchon, Agostino) completed 3rd and chose to present 1st on Friday AM.
Team 4 (DeBenigno, Carroll, Gunn, McGuire, Smith-Mui, Nordholm, Peterson, Klaeveman, Fettig) completed their presentation 4th and chose to present 3rd.
Team 1 (Moreno, Fox, Carpenter, Bowling, Mayer, Black, O’Brien, Bernard, Oetting) were slotted into the remaining speaking slot and will present 2nd on Friday.

After lunch, Dr. Boer led the teams in understanding basic Financial Statements (Balance Sheets, Income Statements and Cash Flow Statements). Accelerator teams built basic statements with Dr. Boer and did initial interpretive findings of statements from the partner companies of Accelerator 2007.

Over dinner, the teams did a de-briefing on their individual performance and contribution to the first team experience (MAPCO).

At 6;30 PM, the teams returned to their Team rooms to assign team roles for Lexus, Clarify the data on hand and begin market research. Members of the teams took the Lexus loan cars out for a drive to “experience” the Lexus IS “precision and performance” product image. The day ended about 9:30 PM. The teams clocked 14.5 work hours today.

Thus far, we’ve clocked 65.5 work hours in five days. I’d say we’ve “hit the ground running….”