Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 10, 1999

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting

The Case of SiNGA
Assessing a Four-Year Intervention

This paper describes an interdisciplinary intervention of George Washington University faculty and students in business, engineering and law to assist a job training program in the fashion industry, evaluates the experience and identifies various support systems to encourage the sustained benefits of cross school alliances. Graduate school intervention to facilitate the competitive advantage of the inner-city is gaining prominence nationally, in academe, and in state and local governments. The competitive advantage of the inner city advanced by Harvard Business School Prof Michael Porter is a new model of economic development that recognizes the unique strengths of urban areas, specifically, strategic location, local market demand, integration with regional business clusters and underutilized human resources. Faculty and students in disciplines such as business, law and engineering can use their skills to provide research and development consulting deliverables that would not otherwise be available to urban entrepreneurs. These cross school collaborations have enormous potential yet there is limited scholarship to chronicle how these strategies are actually working.