1. Context of the Project

In autumn 1998, The Open University Business School began considering a radically different approach to the use of broadcast. The OU was in the process of developing an OU broadcasting strategy to attract audiences and find students on both existing and new broadcast channels. It became apparent that the OUBS would have to bid for programmes and slots that are highly attractive to it by developing clear focus on producing appropriate programmes. OUBS history of broadcasting meant that it has little experience or data upon which to base its broadcast strategy or explore the wealth of ideas around.

2. Changing OU Broadcast Environment

The environment in which OUBS needed to consider its approach to broadcast is changing. Some key points:

• changing patterns of higher education including increased competitive pressures and globalisation (opportunities and competitive threats)
• rapid technological advances revolutionising production and delivery of distance learning materials (new models of delivery based on ICT, new publishers and packagers)
• the potential of technological "packages" associated with broadcast e.g. interactive Web sites
• lifelong learning and its offshoots e.g. UfI

3. Brief History of OU broadcasting

From the beginning of the OU, BBC has been a partner. For 27 years, the OU has used broadcast to deliver distance learning teaching materials to students through agreements with the BBC which allocated specific time slots on BBC2 and Radio 4. Broadcasting created a large non-student audience and greatly increased the OU's visibility in the UK. Through the involvement of BBC Open University Production Centre on campus, high quality was maintained

Partnerships are increasingly being seen as a key feature of successful educational institutions' futures especially with providers of emerging platforms such as telecomm, Internet, cable and satellite. In December 1998 the OU and BBC signed a new 5-year partnership agreement.

4. Future OU Broadcast Directions

Work is currently being done on understanding audiences. A new vision is being developed for the OU as a distinctive educational broadcaster meeting the needs of these target groups but still based on the OU's open to people, methods, places and ideas. There will also be an international broadcasting strategy based on direct sales overseas, programme sales through local distribution and supply deals with international channels.

5. Towards a Broadcast Strategy for OUBS

All broadcast products from OUBS had previously been produced as teaching and learning materials. Some were later been broadcast in available slots and/or as part of Open Saturday programmes and this is continuing in 1999.

However, OUBS needed to develop understanding of the markets that would enable us to develop broadcast projects that are carefully targeted towards audiences and message. .

OUBS agreed to resource two or three broadcast project during 1999 to provide experience and data for decisions in the near future. The Business Café project was the first, and major experiment within this process.

6. The Business Café Concept

The opportunity arose to undertake a "second series" of the Business Café, a concept that had been piloted with six programmes and a Web site during spring 1997. The project was developed in a rapidly changing organisational climate, with new commissioning structures and processes associated with the new agreement with the BBC signed December 98, and a complete change of staffing and roles in the BBC. The target audience was commercial professionals who are interested in all things "business" and "management" as well as the existing OUBS community of Associate Lecturers, students and alumni.

Envisioning and achievement of the project took place in 4 main arenas:

• Production
• Web site
• Publicity
• Research and Evaluation

I report here on the TV programmes and the Web site. Research and Evaluation is continuing on the publicity and the evaluation of the project.

The programme and site represent a departure from previous OUBS/BBC joint ventures that in the main have been designed to accompany specific OUBS courses. The Business Café, with its magazine-style format, attempted to showcase OUBS expertise in specific management research areas. OUBS took principal responsibility for "meaning making" and the BBC focussed on creating engaging and informative television.

7. The Programmes

The programmes were broadcast from 21st February on a weekly basis, except for Easter Sunday with the last programme on 25th April 1999. They were on BBC2 from 7.45 am to 8.15 am.

Each of the 9 programmes included a feature, a series of regular topics and an up to date film which included issues that were discussed on the Web site during the previous week and commentary on the week's markets. Clips from the features and the book reviews can be viewed on the business café Web site.

Week 1 - Ecommerce
Professor Roland Kaye, Dean, OUBS, with the help of Malin Strahle and Maja Brisvall - two young businesswomen from Sweden who run an e-commerce consultancy - examined what is ecommerce and will it take off? Tony Allan of London's Bank Restaurant shared some of his secrets in Taxi Ride, and Andy Law of St Luke's Ad Agency welcomed you to An Office of My Own.

Week 2 - Intellectual Capital
Finding the connection between a stage school and a DIY store - OUBS's Professor Keith Bradley and Dr Denise Stanley, Visiting Lecturer at City University, joined presenter Winifred Robinson to discuss how to capitalize on the intellectual talents that normally lie dormant within organisations. Filmed report featured Stephanie Manuel, co-founder and Senior Principal of Stagecoach and Martin Toogood, Managing Director of B&Q. A Taxi Ride with Paul Brown, Director of New Millennium Network, who claims to be able to teach key computer skills in only ten minutes. An Office of My Own with architect Frank Duffy, Chairman of DEGW (Architects and Consultants) who demonstrated office design for the way we work now. Book Review of 'Working with Emotional Intelligence' by David Coleman.

Week 3 - Social Entrepreneurship.
This week a look at management in the public services and how social service managers in Ashton Under Lyne have initiated new ways of delivering services to people with learning difficulties. The programme illustrated how 'social entrepreneurs' may be changing the focus of management in public and voluntary agencies, but asked about risks and costs in doing so. Featuring OUBS Lecturer Charles Edwards and Dr Linda Keen, Master of Keynes College, University of Kent. Also featuring Taxi Ride, Lord MacLaurin talked about his past as head of Tesco and his future as Chair of the English and Welsh Cricket Board, and an Office of My Own, which looked at the workplace of Mavis Roper of the Manchester Model Agency.

Week 4 - Innovation.
This week, presenter Winifred Robinson and Dr Elizabeth Barnett, OUBS Research Fellow, and Dr Fiona Steele of Cranfield University looked at how companies break new ground through people processes and find imaginative new markets for their products. The main report featured Richard Hicks, Chairman of AIT (Applied Interactive Technologies) of Henley-on-Thames, who employs an Artist in Residence to challenge and confound his staff to keep them on their toes and Tensator, a Milton Keynes based company that applies it's spring technology to a host of unusual commercial applications. Among the regular features, Taxi Ride discovered the tough decisions Heather Rabatts, Chief Executive of Lambeth Council, has to make each day, while An Office of My Own visited a fishing company, Cardium Shellfish, run by John Gilson in Whitstable.

Week 5 - Knowledge Management.
Many organisations neither learn from their success or their failures, nor transfer learning from one project to another. Knowledge Management is, among other things, about learning from and applying experience. Professor Paul Quintas, Director of Research at the Open University Business School (and chair of the course team working on the new MBA elective Knowledge Management) discussed issues with Elizabeth Lank, Programme Director of Mobilising Knowledge at ICL. Jim Marsh of Royal Mail Consulting showed how the Royal Mail is tackling the challenge of organisational learning and we learned how KM is being used to help modernise the Royal Mail's international air mail service. This week's Taxi Ride was with Gwyneth Flowers whose responsibility as Chief Executive of Action 2000 is to persuade businesses to tackle the millennium bug. An Office of My Own featured Mark Dixon of Regus, the 'instant office' company that is revolutionising the way companies use and pay for their office space.

Week 6 - Family Values.
This week, Winifred Robinson asked how do small companies based on the family become larger concerns? Research by Dr Anauradha Basu of Reading University suggests that successful Asian businesses have to bring in help from outside the immediate family circle. We looked at two Asian businesses to see if this is so and Dr Basu, Ram Gidoomal of Winning Communications Partnership and Dr Colin Gray of the Open University Business School discuss the implications.

Week 7 - Regeneration.
Sheffield United Football Club has a unique regeneration partnership with the local community and Sheffield Council. This week, presenter Winifred Robinson found out how the different cultures of private, public and voluntary sectors meet in The Sharrow Partnership to produce a winning team. The studio debate featured Alan Parkinson of the Open University Business School. Also in the programme, share a cab with Martin Sorrell, chief executive of advertising agency WPP, who described how he turned the company's fortunes around, and in An Office of My Own, Peter Coe of the East London and City Health Authority inspires his staff to tackle some of the worst health problems in the UK.

Week 8 - Risk.
In this week's programme presenter Winifred Robinson explored the nature of risk in the City. Working in the heady environment of the trading floor is a risky business, and research suggests that city traders may suffer from an illusion of control. So what can managers do to reduce unnecessary risk? Featured Mark Fenton O'Creevy, OUBS and Desmond Fitzgerald who Explored Risk in the city. In Taxi Ride was Malcolm Miller, Chief Executive of PACE, a company that produces satellite decoders.

Week 9 - 21st Century Manager.
What skills will the manager of the next century require? This week, Winifred Robinson's guests, Dr Gilly Salmon and Professor Gerry Egan of Chicago's Loyola College, discussed how we will work in the future, with contributions from Angela Edwards of the Institute of Personnel Development and Gordon Lang, editor of Personal Computer magazine. Also in the programme, in Taxi Ride, Nicholas Stockton of Oxfam talked about the dilemmas involved in bringing aid to war zones like Rwanda, and An Office of My Own visited a state of the art photographic lab. Business guru Geoff Burch reviewed 'Tiger by the Tail' by Lord MacLaurin of Tesco and Test cricket fame.

8. The Web Site

Throughout the broadcast, the presenter referred to a supporting Web site that contained complimentary content. USWeb/CKS, OUBS technology partner were assigned to create the Web site ready for launch on February 21 and then maintain and update it for the next 10 weeks to coincide with the tv transmissions. As the series will ran over 9 weeks it was important that the site was easily modified to within a template structure to reflect the content of each programme. Like the general OUBS Web site, it was essential that the site was highly accessible and usable from all platforms. The Business Café site was hosted on OUBS' existing server located at OU.

This project was the first time that applied the concept of integrated broadcasting to OUBS activities and we needed to closely monitor how this concept worked. The Web site was seen as a major way of collecting qualitative and quantitative feedback..

The site included:

• This week's feature including video streaming
• Book review including video streaming
• Computer mediated discussion area (using FirstClass)
• "Business briefing" -downloadable specially produced article for each feature
• Web links- special collections of relevant Web sites to illustrate the main feature of the programme
• Tell us about yourself

It also contained the following secondary links;

Previous week's series/sites

And the following tertiary links

• Credits
• Links to the main OU and OUBS sites
• Link to OUBS brochure request
• Link to BBC site
• Link to Amazon for book ordering

9. Costs

Direct:
Production:
£278,000

Web site:
£45,825 (within existing Web framework)
Moderators & consultants: £8,600

Indirect:
Project Officer: Approx one half of time for 6 months
Series Consultant (academic) approx one quarter of time during same period
Project Officer Web (10 days) approx
8 academics as programme consultants, preparing, filming, writing briefings for Web site

Stress:
High

10. Business outcomes

We achieved up to 8% of the audiences at 8 am on Sunday mornings for 9 weeks and it was known that a further percentage of the audience occurred later as the programme was videoed. This was considered a surprisingly high percentage of the audience for a business programme by the BBC.

Only a small proportion of the TV audience logged onto the Web site. Around half the Web site visitors were prompted by the TV programme and around half found the Business Café sites through other sites on the Web. There was a small increase in visitors to the general OUBS site from the Web site.

Many visitors downloaded the further knowledge papers and followed the specially produced links related to each programme. The Computer Mediated Discussion forum was little used. Most of what knew about structure, support, moderation and stimulus to discussion in courses failed to achieve more than a few messages each week in this quite different context.

From the questionnaire responses to the Web site, it seemed that our audience, and our Web visitors were of the kind we had planned to attract- i.e. middle or senior managers or small business owners. Around half were not aware that OUBS offered management education and around half were interested in courses. The actual and opportunity costs, however were high for this outcome.

Gilly Salmon 18th MAY 1999-05-18