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Doing Business With Small Business

NIH Doing Business With Small Business

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Project

This 20 minute course, Doing Business with Small Business, was developed for the National Institutes of Health, Small Business Office (OAMP/SBO). It is designed to teach NIH personnel about the value of working with small businesses to fulfill procurement needs, about small business programs, and about making successful acquisitions.

Approach

Busy professionals are the taget audience for this course. Most would likely feel that they have much more pressing and important things to do, as related directly to their field. d’Vinci was tasked, therefore, with finding a way of delivering the information in a way that would engage and entertain the students so that they would find it less objectionable.

Playing off and parodying reality-based television shows, d’Vinci created an approach that follows the adventures of an “apprentice” project officer as he learns the benefits of contracting with small businesses whenever possible. Characters are presented as comic book illustrations.

d’Vinci’s Role

d’Vinci worked closely with Connie Malamed, who served as the Senior Instructional Designer, to develop the concept. We designed the interface and illustrated all of the custom comic graphics used throughout the course. Programming was done in XHTML, utilizing CSS and some JavaScript; the drag and drop interactions were created using Flash.

This was a joint contract through Exeter Government Services.