The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is the first collegiate business school and has the largest and one of the most published business school faculty, with over 250 standing and associate members across 11 academic departments. In 2010 the Office of the Dean created a new faculty group to foster innovation within the Wharton School. Read about The Wharton School's: - innovation tournaments that generate a large number of concepts of ideas from individuals and create new campaigns benefiting Wharton - "Why Choose Wharton" campaign, that asked faculty and students to submit ideas that improved Wharton's branding and strategic positioning

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THE WHARTON SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY CASE STUDY
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IDEASCALE

2. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is the first collegiate business school
(established in 1881) having the largest and one of the most published business school faculty,
with over 250 standing and associate members across 11 academic departments.
In 2010 the Office of the Dean decided to create a new faculty group in order to foster
innovation within the Wharton School and elected Karl Ulrich as the Vice Dean of Innovation.
The goal of the newly appointed Vice Dean was to create innovation tournaments through
crowdsourcing (Innovation tournaments are used generate a large number of concepts of ideas
from individuals, and then filter them to get them to the top), in order to create new campaigns
benefiting Wharton.
At the time the school’s biggest concern was seeking an appropriate identity and a branding
strategy for Wharton school to identify with to distinguish how Wharton stands out from its
peers. To develop the new strategic position, the Wharton School chose to create a ‘Wharton
Brand’ IdeaScale page where faculty and students helped boil down the question of ‘Why
Choose Wharton?’ into a five minute video describing how the school differs from competing
graduate schools.
Wanting a more succinct description of the school’s differentiation Wharton invited over 3,000
alumni, students, and faculty members to crowdsource a tag line for the Wharton School of
Business. As a result, the school….
• Saw over 190 ideas generated from a community of 367 users
• Received 2492 votes throughout the campaign
• Acknowledged that a tag line is not sufficient to represent the school and therefore
developed the Knowledge campaign - an initiative set to represent all of the different facets
of learning at the Wharton School with an emphasis on a joint collaborative effort between
students and faculty.
• Learned that the Wharton community can achieve greater goals when they interact and
rely on one another for creating and innovating facets of the school.
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Due to the program’s success the IdeaScale model will be taken into account for creating future
campus campaigns that would benefit from student and faculty engagement. For now, the Dean’s
Graduate Student Advisory Council is planning to use IdeaScale to improve the school by
learning from faculty and students.
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