Online Course Packs Launching a start-up product line.

The situation
An information provider started a new division to package and sell customizable online course packs for adoption in college courses. Their development staff had minimal experience at creating college course materials, so they outsourced the product development to O'Donnell & Associates.

The process
First, we put our market development process to work, beginning with some focus groups to test and refine the concept, followed by in-depth interviews to identify the content that needed to be included in a series of literature and history course packs We managed the development process, recruiting subject matter experts (SMEs) to develop collections of articles and primary sources for dozens of history and literature topics. Our SMEs created lecture notes and pedagogy. And, we editorially reviewed all the packs. We worked with programmers to oversee production. Finally, we went back to our earlier research participants and asked them to class test the course packs.

The results
Nearly all of our market development participants became customers. And, our client used these early products to launch itself into the college custom publishing market.