What comes to your mind when we say “grand challenge”? People think about big issues such as ending world hunger and curing cancer. These are certainly big problems that takes several thousand people working every minute for the betterment of the society. We all want to be part of these grand challenges, but either have limited capabilities or the time, given our day-to-day schedule. What if we use these grand challenges as learning opportunities? Perhaps this may allow us to make some incremental contributions and also learn at the same time.
This was the main idea when we started our conversations with the Mid-Ohio Food Bank regarding a “learning lab” for our MBOE students. Mid-Ohio Food Bank is one the largest food bank in the United States primarily catering to the 20 counties surrounding the Columbus region. They are an amazing organization with great talent yet have really complex challenges in serving the community. Think about this for a statistic:
“There are over 400,000 people in Franklin community who live under 200% of the poverty line and miss over 15% of their meals. In other words, over 400,000 people are going without food for an entire day each week.”
This is not because Mid-Ohio Food Bank or their agencies have a shortage of food. It is because as Mark Mollenkopf – Strategic Solutions Developer – so eloquently puts – “Our problem is to get the right food to the right people at the right place and the right time”
This is a perfect learning opportunity for our incoming MBOE students to scope down this larger complex problem into manageable problems in distribution, access, population health, nutrition and consumer behaviors. Our incoming class of students will spend time at the Mid-Ohio Food bank understanding and solving this problem over 5 months beginning November 2019. They will first learn to break the complexity down to workable “chunks”, where to make impactful changes, how to measure and sustain these changes over 4 different learning sessions. Our students won’t be able to eradicate human hunger in 5 months, but they can certainly make a difference and make substantive improvements in this given time.
Our MBOE and Fisher Management Science team are really excited to use this amazing learning opportunity and help our community along the way!
Come and see what we do in our MBOE program at: https://fisher.osu.edu/graduate/mboe