Gary Hansen (UCSB) & Kenneth Pickar (Caltech) Slide Presentation - - PDF document

Gary Hansen (UCSB) & Kenneth Pickar (Caltech) Slide Presentation How did we get here?

• B-schools had a major re-design in the 50s-70s
• Academic institutions are not the most flexible organizations
• B-schools often do work on the side (i.e. centers, etc.)
• Engineering schools are very well designed, leaving little room for flexibility
• Where does entrepreneurship fit into this???

Opportunity

• New jobs created in tech driven businesses
• Larger and smaller companies (UCSB small ones- Inogen- Oxygen, Calient- Fiber
• ptical switching, Indigo Systems)
• You have to understand the technology to understand the alliances and business
• pportunities
• The engineers don’t understand the business, MBAs don’t understand the

technology Blending the best of both (1)

• MBA strengths
• Teams, marketing, finance, contacts
• MBA weaknesses
• Discipline not function, Product development, tactics
• MBAs are applying models that don’t fit the technologies

Blending the best of both (2)

• Engineering strengths
• Problem solving and quant skills
• Tech evolution over time
• Creativity
• Eng. Weaknesses
• Business disciplines
• Lack of interdisciplinary teams

Business & Tech Education

• Depth & breadth of business and tech education (see matrix at the end)
• Who is really good at tech and business skills?
• Is that something companies value? Yes!
• Who is supplying it?
• MIT and Stanford are good at both in their respective schools (engineering

and business), but no school is really good at both.

• Caltech, UCSB good at engineering, Berkeley and UCLA at business
• Nobody gets both right in the same place at a university!
• Where should schools be?

• Is the solution to get your undergrad in engineering at Stanford and then

come back and get your MBA from Stanford several years later?

• How do you play in that one area without having going through 4-5 years
• f undergrad and then 2 years of an MBA?
• Can we do this all in one program at one time?
• What about joint programs that allow students to work across departments

while pursuing a degree (or even multiple degrees simultaneously)?

• Let me pose the challenge whether formal academic programs should

cover that? Or whether this should be a life pursuit rather than something you get in one degree? Current solutions

• Business courses for engineers
• Tech ventures, Entrepreneurial Marketing, Entrepreneurial Finance,

business basics, etc.

• Tech management courses for MBAs
• IP, tech ventures, new product development (most of these are new)
• Alliance programs – MBAs and engineers
• Tech management certificate

Question?

• Are there some courses that don’t exist yet that would really blend these worlds?
• New product development
• Engineering management

Challenge (get into 5 teams to work on this)

• Design one course that could be offered by an eng. school that teaches state of the

art business concepts

• Target customers- senior undergrads or grads prior to engaging in an

entrepreneurial career.

• Project or program manager or new product manager in a tech driven firm
• How do we teach the things about business that engineers know the very

least about?

• UCSB is a good example- there is no business school, there is an

economics program, and a great engineering school. How can we design a course to do this?

• How does the person who is the 10-10 get there? What is their behavior

look like?

Breakout Session Team 1 (Mary Beth from ??)

• Objective: to teach basic business skills to engineering and science students to

function as pros.

• Course topics:
• Accounting!
• Marketing
• Finance
• Sales & customers
• Biz models
• IP
• Leadership
• HR
• Operations/project management
• Product viability
• Methods: (food, beer, pizza)
• Case studeies
• Projects: biz plans, biz simulation
• Role playing
• Consulting projects

ß Within university ß Outside university

• Speakers
• Internships – part of a course?
• Field trips – manufacturing facility, workplace, incubators
• Food!
• Lectures

Team 2 (Eric Suuberg from Brown)

• What are the biggest gaps?
• IP
• Marketing
• Team experience
• Managing people
• Ideas
• Simulation (tech-based spin off)
• Biz plan: concept to commercialization
• Touch functional bases- need of diversity
• Spiral/iterate up to
• Strategic planning
• Combo of classroom & experiential
• 2 semester “capstone” course given by a company and their mentors, present

to the company

• Integrate field experience
• Do you know what the largest background of CEOs is?

• Marketing and sales- and the VCs know this

Team 3 (Renee Rother from Stanford)

• We didn’t think 10/10 was really possible
• Entrepreneurs?
• Loose cannon
• Creativity
• Dreams
• Comfort with ambiguity
• Engineers are not comfortable with this
• What’s the ideal outcome?
• Knowledge (strategy? Process?)
• Skills (tactics)
• Attitudes/behaviors/mindset (Canada has a co-op program)
• MBA mindset vs. sci/eng mindset
• Other?
• Productization 101
• How much X is enough? (X = R&D, market research)
• Need to know what they don’t know and be able to express that (how do

you ask for help).

• How do you get it to market?
• Biz appreciation (finance, pricing, strategy, IP, sales, marketing)
• What problems do you need to prepare for or avoid?
• Corporate citizenship, ethics, conflict management
• Employees/unions, negotiation, social awareness

Team 4 (Kristina Holly from MIT Entrepreneurial Center)

• Content (assume entrepreneurship focus)
• Fuzzy front-end due diligence
• Opportunity assessment (o product yet)
• IP protection and licensing
• Intro fundamentals (marketing, finance, accounting)

ß Include simple terminology (e.g. what is an angel investor?)

• Pedagogy – ideas
• Simulation – start with it, very limited time
• Write business plan
• Real startups
• Look at failures (can learn a lot more from them)- use guest speakers,

case studies, student writes case study

• Team exercises and communication
• Summary
• Start with bootcamp- short and intense

ß Fundaments ß Mini MBA core ß w/simulations

• _ & _ lecture & case special topics
• Case => failure analysis

Session Conclusions

• Can you get all this in one course, or does it have to be more?
• Students work relative to how challenging the courses are and that we need to

make sure us stuff is exciting and pushes them.

• What makes a successful entrepreneur in the marketplace? And then we should

work backwards from that.

• Two course sequence- mini-MBA then entrepreneurship, or do you try to hook

them the other way around?

• There is really too much to do in one class
• Two things were valuable for me
• How do you search? How do you learn new stuff?
• Analyzing failures- students want to hear about the failures from our guest

lectures.

Figure 1- Business Technology Education Depth and Breadth of Business (1-10 scale) Technology Education Depth and Breadth (1-10 scale)