Institute for Business Innovation
Trends & Highlights in Management, Strategy and Organization
The Institute's research and programs in Management, Strategy and Organization continue to maintain and expand their pre-eminence with a growing corpus of outstanding research and the development of new research centers. For more information, please visit our Directory of Research and Programs in Management, Strategy and Organization page.
The Blum Center for Developing Economies, housed at the Institute, was initiated in April 2006 through a $15 million gift from Haas alumnus Richard C. Blum that includes a $5 million challenge grant. Serving as the nexus on the Berkeley campus for cultivating targeted new education programs and convening resources to combat global poverty, the Blum Center focuses on implementing solutions extrapolated from cutting-edge research while engaging students in transformative service programs. With a focus on developing innovative projects in specific countries, Berkeley students will explore the tremendous potential and challenges created by international aid. George Scharffenberger is the center’s executive director.
The Blum Center funded $430,371 for educational programs in developing economies during AY 2006-07 and 2007-08. The first projects were the East Africa Healthcare Initiative and the Initiative on Safe Water and Sanitation. The former are focused on Uganda and Rwanda; the latter project includes support for a portfolio of activities in six countries: India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico. Both projects address poor health status, which are both a leading cause and a debilitating impact of global poverty. Consistent with the Blum Center's objectives, each project employs UC Berkeley-developed technologies and expertise, and both provide hands-on service-learning opportunities for students. The projects also leverage existing partnerships in host countries to increase the likelihood of success, broaden impact and promote sustainability.
The Blum Center has since launched a portfolio of initiatives that focuses on enhancing the welfare of the poor in developing regions through the development, testing and diffusion of low-cost, energy related, technologies that meet real needs, emphasize energy efficiency and minimize negative environmental impacts such as CO2 emissions. Another new portfolio of initiatives addresses the opportunities of cellular phone service and new computing and communications technologies to expand and improve health-related services to rural populations.
The Blum Center’s inaugural course offering, an eight-week, two-unit class - titled "Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium", in fall 2006, generated so much student demand that it had to be relocated twice to accommodate more than 200 undergraduate and grad-student enrollees.
The Blum Center coordinated the creation of a new undergraduate program, beginning fall 2007, that seeks to motivate and prepare students to become active in alleviating poverty worldwide. The "Global Poverty & Practice" minor is housed in the International and Area Studies Teaching Program. It forms a response to strong student demand for a globally-based curriculum and will serve to cement UC Berkeley's reputation as an "engaged university" that focuses on research, education and service for the benefit of society.
In 2005-2006, the Institute sponsored nine Visiting Scholars from Italy, Austria, Japan, Brazil, Korea, and the US. The Institute also distributed $355,000 in direct student aid, including 112 paid research fellowships supporting many campus departments including the Haas School of Business, School of Information, EECS, PEIS, BioEngineering, Public Health, Public Policy, Energy and Resources, City and Regional Planning, Economics, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, and Mechanical Engineering.
In October 2006, the academic journal Research Policy published a special issue, Volume 35, Issue 8, commemorating the 20th Anniversary of David Teece's article, Profiting From Technology Innovation, (Research Policy, Volume 15, Issue 6, December 1986). This is the single most cited paper ever published by Research Policy, with 740 cites as of May 2007.
From the special issue Introduction: “the importance of the paper extends beyond technology and innovation management to broader topics of business strategy, science and technology policy, and the theory of the firm…Teece left forever the relatively narrow confines of economic analyses of innovation, and forged a much broader, multidisciplinary approach to the study of innovation…he combines economics with organizations, technologies, intellectual property, and markets (or the lack thereof) for complementary assets.”
A conference was held at the Haas School of Business on September 21, 2006, in which the special issue papers were presented, as well as special guest lectures by Dean Tom Campbell on “Innovation and the Law: The contributions of David Teece” and by David Teece on “Reflections on Profiting from Innovation.” Papers and panel topics included Economics and Innovation, Innovation and IP Protection, and extensions to Profiting from Innovation.
From the special issue Introduction: “the importance of the paper extends beyond technology and innovation management to broader topics of business strategy, science and technology policy, and the theory of the firm…Teece left forever the relatively narrow confines of economic analyses of innovation, and forged a much broader, multidisciplinary approach to the study of innovation…he combines economics with organizations, technologies, intellectual property, and markets (or the lack thereof) for complementary assets.”
A conference was held at the Haas School of Business on September 21, 2006, in which the special issue papers were presented, as well as special guest lectures by Dean Tom Campbell on “Innovation and the Law: The contributions of David Teece” and by David Teece on “Reflections on Profiting from Innovation.” Papers and panel topics included Economics and Innovation, Innovation and IP Protection, and extensions to Profiting from Innovation.
Director of the Institute and Haas School Professor David Teece was recognized as the tenth most cited scholar worldwide in economics, business, and finance in a survey of highly cited research that was published in the November/December 2005 issue of Science Watch, a publication that tracks trends in basic research.
Using figures from Essential Science Indicators, Thomson Scientific's database of nearly 200 Thomson Scientific-indexed journals of business and economics, Science Watch built a list of the most cited institutions, authors, and journals from 1995 to 2005. Teece, the Mitsubishi Bank Professor of International Business and Finance, and director of the Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization, was tenth on the list of most-cited authors with 897 citations in the ten-year period of the study. UC Berkeley ranked #7 in total citations.
The most cited paper in the study was coauthored by Teece with then-Haas doctoral students Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen. The paper, "Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management" (Strategic Management Journal, 18 [7] 1997), which has been cited over 600 times, explored a new framework for analyzing the sources and methods of wealth creation and capture by firms, which they called the "dynamic capabilities framework." Using this framework they concluded that strategizing against competitors is less effective than identifying and taking advantage of new opportunities.
Online access to the current issue of Science Watch is available only to subscribers at http://www.sciencewatch.com/.
