Lester Center to Head New Research Initiative on Entrepreneurship
Institute Creates Center for Open Innovation
New Book by Prof. David Mowery Focuses on All Aspects of Innovation
Management of Technology Enrollments Continue to Climb
MOT to Host UNIDO Bridging the Divide Conference
Joint UN/MOT Research Program Sends Students Around the Globe
IMIO Supports New St. Petersburg School of Management Ph.D. Program
Haas Student Teams Win National Competitions
Fair Trade Firm Shines among Social Ventures
Harmonic Devices Takes Top Business Plan Prize
MBAs Win National VC Competition
Lester Center Honors Kramlich
President and COO of Adobe Speaks at >play Digital Media Conference
Global Social Venture Competition
MOT/UNIDO Bridging the Divide
Summer Institute in Competitive Strategy
VoIP Volcano Workshop

Lester Center to Head New Research Initiative on Entrepreneurship

Professor John Freeman and the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, an affiliate of the Institute, have received a $600,000 two-year grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to investigate the causes and consequences of entrepreneurship in the United States.

Professors Engel and Freeman

Led by Freeman, research director of the Lester Center, the " Causes and Consequences of Entrepreneurship in the United States" project will support the research of faculty and doctoral candidates across various departments at UC Berkeley. The grant will support the first two years of a project that could be extended to four years with funding expected to total $1.2 million.

Researchers will be examining the effects of entrepreneurial activity on a broad array of areas, including job creation and destruction, the impact on the broader pool of “stakeholders” beyond the founders themselves, and the differing processes through which companies are started and developed. This creates an opportunity to challenge faculty across campus to focus on the importance and relevance of entrepreneurship to their own areas of research interest. This campus-wide research collaboration will bring a unique, academically powerful spotlight on the broad social and financial impact of entrepreneurship.

For more information please visit the program website.

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Institute Creates Center for Open Innovation

The Center for Open Innovation (COI), an affiliate of the Institute, has recently been established. Formerly known as the Center for Technology Strategy and Management, the COI conducts scholarly research on more open, distributed models for organizing and managing technology and innovation. Henry Chesbrough, Ph.D. 97, is serving as the first executive director of the center.

"Industrial innovation is in the process of significant change," said David J. Teece, director of IMIO and the Mitsubishi Bank Professor of International Business and Finance. "In the future, innovation promises to be less inwardly focused, increasingly distributed, and far more global. The concept of open innovation nicely articulates this shift, and promises to inform research and practice on innovation management for many years to come."

To date, the COI has raised research funds from foundation, industry, and government sources. Its funds have been used to support research by faculty members as well as MBA and Ph.D. students. Funding has come from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, IBM, Dell, Inc., and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).

For more information please visit the Center website.

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New Book by Prof. David Mowery Focuses on All Aspects of Innovation

The Oxford University Press has just published a new Oxford Handbook of Innovation edited by David Mowery, Associate Director of the Institute and Milton W. Terrill Professor of Business at the Haas School, and co-editors Jan Fagerberg and Richard R. Nelson.

This handbook is meant to provide academics and students with a comprehensive and holistic understanding of innovation. The editors selected 21 contributions from leading academic experts within a particular field, each focusing on a specific aspect of innovation.

The book is organized into four sections: the creation of innovations; how institutions and organizations influence innovation; differences in the implementation of innovation over time and across different sectors of the economy; and the consequences of innovation with respect to economic growth, international competitiveness, and employment.

For more information, visit the OUP book page.

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Management of Technology Enrollments Continue to Climb

The Management of Technology Program, an affiliate of the Institute, continues to expand at UC Berkeley, having grown steadily from only 26 courses in fall of 1999 to 44 courses being offered to business, engineering, and information management students in spring 2004.

These courses are offered through the interdisciplinary Management of Technology (MOT) program, a partnership between the Haas School of Business, the College of Engineering, and the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS). MOT is the single largest interdisciplinary program on the Berkeley campus as measured by class enrollment, reporting 1,442 course enrollments in 2003-2004, up from 850 in 1999-2000. 104 students received a MOT Certificate in 2004 for having completed four or more MOT courses, more than any other certificate program.

In addition to offering courses, MOT helps students find internships and hands-on projects in technology companies, organizes a lectures series with prominent business and technology leaders, and grants a wide range of fellowships, including the Mayfield Fellows Program, Hitachi Fellows Program, China Fellows program and the MOT-UNIDO Fellows Program, as well as organizing the joint MOT - UNIDO "Bridging the Divide" conference at UCB each spring. Presently, more than 50 UC Berkeley graduate students are MOT Fellows.

For more information please visit the program website.

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MOT to Host UNIDO Bridging the Divide Conference

Bridging the Divide: 2006
Technology, Innovation, and Learning in Developing Economies

A Joint Conference of

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)
and The University of California, Berkeley

In April 2006, the Management of Technology Program, supported by the Institute, will host a joint UNIDO - UC Berkeley conference on accelerating the development of emerging economies through technology, innovation and education.

Bridging the Divide 2006 brings together scholars, practitioners, and government and corporate policy makers into a single forum focused on the role of technology in the world's developing economies.

• Technology essentials for economic development
• Healthcare technology in the developing world
• The role and potential of education
• Environmentally sustainable industry
• Energy solutions in the developing world
• Technology for communications and commerce

The goal is to accelerate the exchange of ideas and technologies that create beneficial partnerships between industrialized countries and developing regions. This is congruent with UNIDO's mission to help developing countries fight marginalization in today's increasingly global economy.

For more information please visit the conference website.

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Joint UN/MOT Research Program Sends Students Around the Globe

Eight teams of Haas School and UC Berkeley students traveled to developing countries to put theory into practice this summer as UN/Management of Technology Fellows. The fellows are part of the research portion of the new collaboration between the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the Management of Technology Program, an affiliate of the Institute, titled "Bridging the Divide.” The students formed their own teams, selected a field destination, and prepared a research plan built around a sustainable solution for economic development in a developing country to be considered for a grant. The eight teams selected to receive a grant spend at least three weeks in a developing region conducting field research.

One team implemented and tested a Distributed Searchable Cache system (DiSC), which speeds up Internet access by "caching" (storing) frequently viewed web pages on the local area network and creating a searchable index to assist users in answering their search queries. In June 2004, the team spent three weeks in Accra, Ghana installing DiSC at universities and at a popular Internet café. DiSC was created by Computer Science Ph.D. students R.J. Honicky and Omar Bakr. From the Haas School, Ph.D. student Aaron Chatterji and MBA student Samir Mehta, rounded out the team.

Another UNIDO team spent three weeks in August 2004 in Cape Town, South Africa. The team was composed of four students from the combined MBA/Master's of Public Health program: Doris Chang, Lori Chelius, Mona Gavankar, and Rashell Young. The four researched whether women in South Africa might be able to self-collect samples to test for Human Papillomavirus (HPV), one of the more common sexually transmitted diseases, and one for which high-risk strains can develop into cervical cancer if untreated. Interviews with women from rural parts of Cape Town provided the information this team sought in identifying barriers to self-collection.

There were Berkeley MBA or Haas School Ph.D. students on four of the eight teams selected to receive grants. Team members also come from the College of Engineering, the School of Information Management and Systems, the School of Chemistry, the School of Public Health, the Department of Economics, the Department of City and Regional Planning, the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and the Energy and Resources Group.

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IMIO Supports New St. Petersburg School of Management Ph.D. Program

Continuing its partnership with the St. Petersburg University School of Management, the Institute’s SOM Program will sponsor training for faculty members of a new doctoral program offered by the Russian university that is designed to elevate the quality of research in business and management science in the former Soviet Union. The training of new Ph.D. faculty is the latest instance of Institute support for the SOM, Russia's first Western-style business school. The SOM is modeled after the Haas School, its founding partner of 12 years. In that time the SOM has grown from 35 students to 1500, in undergraduate, MBA, international MBA, and doctoral programs.

Current SOM dean Valery Katkalo was inspired to start the school after visiting Haas as a Ph.D. student in 1989. His efforts were helped by many Haas staff and faculty members, including key advocate David Teece, Mitsubishi Bank Professor of International Business and Finance at Haas and director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Management, Innovation & Organization (IMIO). The SOM has had a doctoral program since 1997 and now marks a significant shift from the traditional Russian style of focusing almost exclusively on the dissertation process to an approach that incorporates increased coursework, training, and student/professor interaction. This new effort will make the SOM's program the first business Ph.D. in the former Soviet Union to move toward the structure of programs in the US and Europe.

The wherewithal to deliver such ground-breaking courses as "Theory of Industrial Organizations," "Quantitative Methods in Management," and "Macroeconomics in Transition Economies" will come, in part, after eight current SOM faculty members each spend a month at Haas between January and October engaging in research with a Haas faculty advisor and gathering material to design the SOM Ph.D. courses. So equipped, these professors will return to Russia and share their new-found approaches not only with SOM Ph.D. students, but also with professors from universities across the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a collection of 12 former Soviet nations.

Financial support for the training is sponsored by the Open Society Institute (OSI) in Budapest, which is funded by George Soros. Professor Dwight Jaffee is faculty director of the UC Berkeley-St. Petersburg University School of Management Program, and Susanne Campbell is executive director.

One way in which the SOM's research credentials are being furthered is through publication of the Russian Management Journal, launched in 2003 and co-founded by Teece. The Russian Academy of Science is now represented on the advisory board of the journal, whose publication has signaled to the scientific community that the SOM has a serious interest in research on business and its institutions.

"This will make the SOM's program the first business Ph.D. in the former Soviet Union to move toward the structure of programs in the US and Europe," says Susanne Campbell, executive director of the UC Berkeley-St. Petersburg University School of Management Program. Future plans for the SOM include an Institute for Research in Management and an English-language executive MBA program, reflecting the school's commitment to both strengthening scientific research and educating Russia's future corporate managers in business leadership.

For more information please visit the program website.

Haas Student Teams Win National Competitions

UC Berkeley Semiconductor Team Wins Inaugural Intel-Berkeley Tech Challenge

Harmonic Devices, a Berkeley MBA and engineering team whose semiconductor technology promises to dramatically improve the cost, functionality, and size of portable devices, won the global Intel+UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge held on Friday, November 18, 2005 at the Haas School. The competition, which is sponsored by Intel Corporation and hosted by the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, an affiliate of the Institute, promotes the commercialization of technological innovations that promise significant positive impact on industry and society.

"This competition brings together entrepreneurs from around the world to learn from each other -- these teams are all winners," said Jerome Engel, executive director of the Lester Center. "In joining forces with us, Intel recognized the unique setting the Haas School and its Lester Center provide to promote global innovation due to their excellence in both technology and business innovation."

Harmonic Devices took the challenge's grand prize of $25,000 for its technology that delivers new levels of component miniaturization, longer battery life, and lower costs. For their initial target market of mobile phones and other portable wireless handsets, Harmonic Devices will introduce the world's first silicon chip integrating radio-frequency filters for multiple bands.

Harmonic Devices also won the University of San Francisco International Business Plan Competition in March and the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition in May of 2005. The technology for Harmonic Devices was developed by Gianluca Piazza and Philip Stephanou at the College of Engineering's Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center. Piazza is a recent Ph.D. graduate in electrical engineering; Stephanou is completing his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. The management team also consists of electrical engineering Ph.D. candidate Justin Black and full-time Berkeley MBA 2005 graduate Kenneth Miller.

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Fair Trade Firm Shines among Social Ventures

A Haas Team, World of Good, a distributor of globally-sourced, fair-trade certified gifts and accessories, beat out eight teams to take first place at the Global Social Venture Competition in April.

The team members are Berkeley MBA alumni Priya Haji and Siddharth Sanghvi, both MBAs 03, and first-year students David Guendelman and Jonathan Klein. World of Good also won the inaugural Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) Venture Challenge, taking home $250,000 in seed financing. It took second place in the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition.

"This year, the Global Social Venture Competition really came into its own with strong plans from Europe and Asia that rivaled the US entries," says Jerome Engel, executive director of the Institute’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, which hosted the competition.

The competition, founded by five Berkeley MBA students in 1999, has grown into a global partnership between UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Columbia Business School in New York, and London Business School, as well as long-time sponsor The Goldman Sachs Foundation and Omidyar Networks.

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Harmonic Devices Takes Top Business Plan Prize

Technology improving the performance, battery life, and component size of mobile phones and portable wireless devices helped a team of Berkeley MBA and engineering students take the top prize of $25,000 at this year's UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition.

Harmonic Devices uses a micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) that is based on research breakthroughs achieved at the engineering school's Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC). The team members are: John Hwang, MBA 05; Kenneth Miller, MBA 05; Justin Black and Gianluca Piazza, both Ph.D.s 05 in electrical engineering and computer science; and Philip Stephanou, Ph.D. 06 in mechanical engineering.

The Harmonic Devices team also won the UC Berkeley Nanotech Challenge and the Elevator Pitch Challenge at the University of San Francisco's annual International Business Plan Competition in early 2005.

UC Berkeley's competition is organized annually by Berkeley MBA students and hosted by the Institute’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation in collaboration with UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, the School of Information Management and Systems, and UC San Francisco. This year's competition enjoyed the support of more than 80 judges from leading venture-capital firms and donations from 22 sponsors.

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MBAs Win National VC Competition

Berkeley MBA students won the $10,000 grand prize at the eighth annual Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) held in April at the University of North Carolina's Kenan Flagler Business School.

The Berkeley team, which had placed second at VCIC's Western regional finals in February, included Manuel Rodriguez, Alex Jeffers, Daniel Yoo, Josh Scott, Camille Landis (who could not make the trip to UNC), and Jeff Renaud (who ably stood in for her). They beat competing business school teams from the universities of Chicago, Colorado, Harvard, MIT, Texas, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

In the competition, participating teams evaluated business plans and presentations to decide which plans they would fund in their role as venture capitalists. A panel of actual venture capitalists then judged the teams' investment decisions. The Berkeley MBA team's winning strategy was not to fund any of the business plans presented to them.

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Lester Center Honors Kramlich

One of Silicon Valley's early venture capitalists, C. Richard Kramlich, was given the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Institute's Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation last spring.

Kramlich is the co-founder and general partner of New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firms. "Over the past 30 years, he has become known as an exceptional investor, exemplary leader in the entrepreneurship community, and ardent champion of the venture capital community's interests," says Jerome Engel, executive director of the Lester Center.

Kramlich has built a reputation as a someone who is down-to-earth and informal and who possesses a skill for picking partners and deals wisely. This has led to the success of NEA, which he helped to create in 1978. Of the 500 companies NEA has invested in, 149 have gone public, including 3Com, Silicon Graphics, Juniper Networks, and Ascend Technology.

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President and COO of Adobe Speaks at >play Digital Media Conference, Nov. 5, 2005

>play, the Berkeley Digital Media Conference, featured Shantanu Narayen, MBA 93, president and COO of Adobe Systems, as one of three keynote speakers at the conference, which took place on Saturday, November 5, at the Haas School. The conference was supported by the Institute’s Fisher Center for Information Technology.

At Adobe, a company known for its digital media products including Photoshop, Acrobat, and GoLive, Narayen sets the vision for new product lines and guides expansion into new markets. He has been at Adobe since 1998 and was promoted to president and chief operating officer in January 2005. He also serves on the Haas School 's Advisory Board.

Keynote speakers also included Cammie Dunaway, chief marketing officer of Yahoo! and Neil Young, vice president and general manager of Electronic Arts’ Los Angeles studio.

>play continues the tradition of the Leading Edge technology conferences of past years. It included panel discussions on games, music, design as a competitive advantage, digital rights management, rich mobile content, and more. >play will also host an expo of digital media technologies and an interactive gaming center, as well as an after-party displaying digital media artwork at Fluid in San Francisco. The conference was organized by the Haas Technology Club, the Digital Media and Entertainment Club, and the Fisher Center for Information Technology. Yahoo! was the main sponsor of the conference.

For more information visit www.playconference.org or contact Rich Brown, MBA 06, at rbrown@haas.berkeley.edu or Peter Vlastelica, MBA 06 at vlasteli@haas.berkeley.edu.

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Global Social Venture Competition, April 15, 2005

World of Good beat out eight other teams to take first place at the 2005 Global Social Venture Competition finals held at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. World of Good, a business founded by Berkeley MBAs Priya Haji and Siddharth Sanghvi, both MBA 03, distributes a line of globally sourced fair trade gifts and accessories under fair trade guidelines that generate employment for women and disadvantaged communities, promise a living wage, and promote social and economic development. The team also included first-year MBA students David Guendelman and Jonathan Klein.

The competition, founded by five Berkeley MBA students in 1999, has grown into a global partnership between UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Columbia Business School in New York, and London Business School, as well as long-time sponsor The Goldman Sachs Foundation and Omidyar Networks which also supports the competition. The winning teams share $60,000 in travel and cash prizes that will help them launch businesses committed to creating significant positive social impact. The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, a unit of the Institute, hosts the competition.

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MOT/UNIDO Bridging the Divide, April 21-23, 2005

On April 21-23, 2005, the Institute supported the Bridging the Divide 2005 - Technology, Innovation and Learning in Developing Economies conference. Bridging the Divide is a conference, organized by the Management of Technology Program in cooperation with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), with the goal of accelerating the development of emerging economies through technology, innovation and education.

Bridging the Divide 2005 brought together scholars, practitioners, and government and corporate policy makers into a single forum focused on the role of technology in the world's developing economies and exchanges of ideas and technologies that create beneficial partnerships between industrialized countries and developing regions.. Panels, lectures, and workshops covered the following topics: Technology essentials for economic development, Healthcare technology in the developing world, the role and potential of education, Environmentally sustainable industry, Energy solutions in the developing world, and Technology for communications and commerce.

The conference was opened by Carlos Magarinos, the Director-General of UNIDO, with apresentation on “New Directions for the UN" at a special Management of Technology lecture at the Haas School on Monday, November 1.

UNIDO Director-General Carlos Magariños

Magariños has been Director-General of UNIDO since December 1997, when he was elected for a four-year term by an overwhelming majority of the organization's member states, making him the first Argentine, as well as the youngest person, to head a United Nations specialized agency. In December 2001, he was re-elected as Director-General for a further period of four years. During his first term of office, the director-general implemented an aggressive reform program that has received worldwide recognition and is now working to ensure and maintain excellent standards in the delivery of UNIDO's services in his second term.

The conference also featured keynote speeches by development experts from around the world:

• Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa, former Rwandan Ambassador to the US and the UN and visiting scholar in MOT, on economic development in Africa
• Australia’s director of global development, Dr. Vijoleta Braach-Maksvytis, on Australia's work in economic development worldwide
• El Salvador’s Ricardo Navarro, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize and head of Latin America’s largest environmental NGO, on the role of appropriate technology in environmental protection
• Dr. David Lawrence, former chairman of the Kaiser Permanente healthcare system, on the extension of modern healthcare to less-privileged regions
• Nick Donofrio, IBM senior vice president, and Sophia Chew, vice president and general manager at Intel on the role of multinationals in development efforts

UC Berkeley students who participated in the MOT-UNIDO Fellowship program in 2004 and 2005 also presented their work at the. Nearly 50 UC Berkeley graduate students from across campus travel overseas under the fellowships to work on technologies appropriate to developing regions, with teams so far working in China, India, South Africa, Mali, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Brazil, and Mexico. Their research ranges from safe drinking water technologies to tuberculosis treatment systems to Internet-based learning systems in the developing world.

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Summer Institute in Competitive Strategy, June 27 -July 1, 2005

From June 27 th to July 1st, 2005, the Institute hosted the 3rd SICS-Summer Institute in Competitive Strategy at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. SICS brings together researchers in marketing interested in competitive strategy over an extended period of time, to present and discuss research in this area, exchange ideas, and engage in collaborative work. Three research papers were presented and discussed in detail for each of the five days of the conference.

The topics examined concern competitive strategy broadly defined, covering both theoretical and empirical work. Topics included pricing, price discrimination, product design, new product development, brand and customer equity, advertising, promotion, distribution channels, sales force management, e-commerce, customer relationship management, customer retention, lifetime value of customers, and psychological phenomena relevant to competitive strategy.

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VOIP Volcano Workshop, October 1, 2004

On October 1, 2004, the Institute supported the VoIP Volcano – Sustainable Strategies for a Disruptive Technology workshop. The “disruptive technology” of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is capable of delivering mass market communications over the nation’s existing infrastructure at lower cost and with greatly expanded capabilities relative to traditional circuit-switched services. The workshop and conference examined the fundamental technological and economic properties of this technology and their implications for business strategy and technology policy.

Drawing on expertise from executives from technology and media companies such as SBC and Comcast, and moderated by leading Berkeley faculty including Michael Katz, Glenn Woroch, Hal Varian, and others, the workshop focused on the obstacles and opportunities posed by this disruptive technology for incumbents and startups, for business and residential users, and for service providers and equipment vendors.

The workshop was preceded by a special edition of the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum which addressed business models and start-up businesses based on this new technology. The VoIP Volcano conference was organized by the Center for Research in Telecommunications Policy in cooperation with the Center for Telecommunications & Digital Convergence, the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and Institute of Business & Economic Research.

For more information please see the conference website or contact the CRTP Executive Director, Glenn Woroch, at woroch@haas.berkeley.edu.

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