Ian W. Mackenzie
Senior Lecturer of Business Administration
Ian Mackenzie joined the HBS faculty in January 2012. He teaches Strategy to first year MBAs (Required Curriculum) and conducts workshops on consulting skills for the second year MBAs. As Faculty Chair of Independent Projects, he is working to enhance the value derived from these second year projects. His research interests sit at the intersection of strategy and innovation and currently focuses on how firms that produce complex technology systems collaborate with external component suppliers to align and sustain innovation.
Ian Mackenzie joined the HBS faculty in January 2012. He teaches Strategy to first year MBAs (Required Curriculum) and conducts workshops on consulting skills for the second year MBAs. As Faculty Chair of Independent Projects, he is working to enhance the value derived from these second year projects. His research interests sit at the intersection of strategy and innovation and currently focus on how firms that produce complex technology systems collaborate with external component suppliers to align and sustain innovation.
Following his MBA from HBS in 1979, Dr. Mackenzie’s career has spanned management consulting, entrepreneurial management and academia. He was a consultant and manager with the Boston Consulting Group (1979-1986), Senior Partner and Head of the European Securities Industry Practice, Head of the European Strategy Practice for the Mitchell Madison Group (1995-2001), Director in charge of Financial Services with OC&C Strategy Consultants (2001-2004), and Chief Executive of the Think Play Do Group, an innovation management consultancy (2005-2011).
On the management side he spent seven years as Managing Director (Europe) for Thomson Financial (1986-1994) during which time he grew the business from a start up to one having six business lines spanning software, value-added networks and database products. In addition to building the business across Europe he was directly involved in supporting the development of these business lines in the Asia-Pacific region.
On the academic side, Dr. Mackenzie was a Fellow at the Imperial College Business School (2005-2011). He taught strategy, organization and innovation management, principally at Executive levels and taught ‘consulting skills’ in the school’s MBA programmes. He designed, directed and taught on several Executive Education programmes. His varied research interests included the impact of information and communication technologies on carbon abatement and an assessment of the factors underpinning the success of the London Olympics construction program.
Ian Mackenzie holds B.Sc.(Eng.) and Ph.D. degrees in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College London. He obtained his MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Harkness Fellow and a Baker Scholar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.
-
Course Overview Note
|
2012
Making a Success of your EC Independent Project: Good Practices for Students
Ian W. Mackenzie
Independent project (IP) work in the EC poses challenges over and above those encountered in the project components of RC FIELD. Based on the belief that the success of IPs can be greatly influenced by how well students select and scope their projects and then go about executing them, this note sets out seven detailed areas of good practice. These cover (i) the defining phase, (ii) the planning phase, (iii) the executing phase, (iv) the reporting phase, (v) the reflecting phase, (vi) team work, and (vii) stakeholder management. While most of these good practices leverage experience from the management consulting industry, they have broad applicability to the many different forms of IPs. Indeed they could well be viewed as a generic 'business problem solving toolkit.'
Keywords: Independent Projects;
BEST practices;
learning by doing;
practical project work;
Teamwork;
project management;
stakeholder management;
stakeholder engagement;
Projects;
Groups and Teams;
Citation:
Mackenzie, Ian W. "Making a Success of your EC Independent Project: Good Practices for Students." Harvard Business School Course Overview Note 713-468, December 2012.
-
Course Overview Note
|
2012
Good Practices for Supervising an EC Independent Project
Ian W. Mackenzie
Spurred by the notion that Faculty Supervisors (FSs) can make a significant contribution to the educational value and overall success of Independent Projects (IPs) to students, this note offers a set of good practices which can be used to guide the policies and practices of FSs in relation to IPs. It is hoped that this note will encourage FSs to be more pro-active in influencing student performance in IPs and be particularly useful for those FSs who have less direct experience in performing or overseeing business-focused project work. The note covers (i) the challenges presented by IPs, (ii) the role of the FS, (iii) a brief overview of 'good practices for students undertaking IPs' and (iv) good practices in supervising IPs. The last named includes the assessment of IPs and includes suggested assessment criteria.
Keywords: Independent Projects;
Faculty Supervisor;
Project manager;
Student evaluation;
Projects;
Groups and Teams;
-
Article
| Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice
| Forthcoming
Sustaining Innovation When Outsourcing Components in Multi-technology, Multi-component Systems
Ian Mackenzie and Casimer DeCusatis
Firms producing multi-technology, multi-component systems are increasingly outsourcing selected components to achieve both reduced cost and enhanced innovation benefits. Given typical inter-dependence between innovation at the system and component levels, an important challenge for the system firm is to align innovation trajectories, priorities, and pacing between the system and component firms and sustain overall system-level innovation over the longer term. We present two longitudinal case studies, drawn from the IT industry, which provide contrasting examples of outsourcing strategies in terms of the number of suppliers per component and the inter-firm arrangements that a system firm put in place to align innovation. These cases help us to identify the range of outsourcing strategies that system firms could pursue and the factors that appear to influence which one is most appropriate.
Keywords: innovation;