Maria Carkovic, Executive Director of the Institute for Business Innovation, provides a recap of the Institute’s activities:
Overview
In Summer and Fall 2015, IBI’s centers and programs:
- Held three large research conferences in the areas of intellectual property management, open innovation, and competitive strategy.
- Launched the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program to provide seed funding, training, and mentoring for students, and started a new center that seeks to foster entrepreneurship in the Middle East.
- Organized small- and large-scale executive summits and roundtables to tackle issues in open innovation, information technology, applied innovation and design, and data analytics.
- Facilitated the Haas Tech Case Challenge competition with Facebook as the protagonist.
- Offered the first Applied Data Analytics project course with Accenture’s collaboration.
Conferences
The first large research conference involved the Inaugural Tusher Initiative Conference last July, organized by David Teece with participation of academics, corporate executives and government officials. The conference sought to highlight, from a management and policy perspective, emerging intellectual property issues where a domestic focus may obscure international ramifications. It featured two roundtables, one on global patents and another on global copyright and trade secret issues. You may see the videos of the conference or read a HaasNow article.
The Garwood Center held its second World Open Innovation Conference last November. The conference had over 170 participants in a three-day event that featured academic presentations, working sessions on innovation challenges submitted by companies, and networking opportunities. To see the academic and corporate presentations, go to the website, click presentations at the top of the page, and enter the password passkey2015 when prompted.
A final research conference supported by IBI was the two-week Summer Institute in Competitive Strategy, also last July. The conference, entirely academic, featured a special session in Big Data and Marketing and another on Behavioral and Social Phenomena in Markets (to access the conference papers, click here.)
Research
IBI supported research activities by
- Funding of the weekly Oliver Williamson Seminar,
- Providing fellowships to BPP PhD students,
- Editing the Industrial and Corporate Change Journal, which this year held its bi-annual editors’ meeting, and
- Hosting the research conferences mentioned above.
Organizational Development
IBI launched the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program (see its new website). The Program contains the Dean’s Startup Seed Fund, which provides $5,000 grants to early-stage, Haas student startups for prototype development, and customer discovery activities. The first ten awards, selected among 70+ entries, were granted in December to teams including (at least one) Haas student and students in Engineering & BioEngineering, Chemistry, EECS, PoliSci, iSchool, Public Health as well as the UCB-UCSF joint Medicine and BioE programs. Beyond seed funding, the Program also seeks to enhance entrepreneurship through other activities, such as events in which students pitch ideas in particular areas, such as products for older customers (the Aging 2.0 Pitch in October) or new food products (the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum devoted to food startups in November (see this). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program is training and mentoring budding entrepreneurs by helping students form teams for entrepreneurship competitions and then providing input from experts as they develop their ideas.
IBI welcomed the Center for Entrepreneurship and Development in The Middle East into Haas, which seeks to enhance entrepreneurship and innovation in the region through training, conferences and exposure to entrepreneurs in Berkeley and the Bay Area. See the HaasNow article.
Corporate Outreach
Of the many interactions between IBI centers and programs, students, and the corporate world during the last six months, here are some highlights:
- In September, the Fisher-CIO program held its Fourth Annual CIO Seminar and Fisher-Hopper Award ceremony. Speakers and panelists addressed issues around the theme “Becoming a Digital CIO”.
- In November, the Berkeley Innovation Forum celebrated its 10th year anniversary, under the leadership of Henry Chesbrough and with the participation of speakers from Airbnb, Cisco, Dow Chemical, Deloitte and SAP.
- Also in November, the Haas Tech Club supported by Fisher-CIO Advisory Board members held the Fifth Annual Haas Tech Challenge. Student teams from major business schools compete to solve a business problem in the technology industry. This year Facebook was the case protagonist, and Tim Campos, the company CIO, was in the panel of judges.
- During the Fall semester, Tom Lee and Dave Rochlin offered a new project-based class–Applied Data Analytics. A mix of Haas, I-School, and science students analyzed large datasets on hospital admissions and discharges. The students were split into teams, each focusing on a different Chicago area hospital group, and tasked with demonstrating how data modeling can be used to identify strategies to address Affordable Care Act-driven changes and the move to value-based care. IBI partnered with Accenture for funding, mentoring, and data access.
- The Garwood Center, Fisher CIO Leadership Program, and Berkeley Roundtable on Applied Innovation and Design, BRAID, held numerous roundtables on campus and the Bay Area to make presentations and orchestrate discussions on topics of interest to their corporate partners. These same partners, in turn, collaborate with our faculty by delivering project ideas for experiential courses such as Haas@Work, the EWMBA’s Mid-Program Academic Retreat, and Building Smart Cities.