What makes the Berkeley curriculum "cutting edge"?
There are a lot of things that I could mention.
Certainly, some of the things that I just mentioned are quite unique.
They're different from what other business schools are doing in the area of
combining leadership and innovation.
Within certain specialization areas within the curriculum, there are a lot of activities that are taking place that are cutting edge in various fields.
In the area of behavioral economics, we have the "X Lab."
This is a research program designed to run simulations examining the ways in which economic decisions are made by consumers.
It includes faculty from economics and from finance. They've been doing significant research in this field of behavioral finance, which there aren't many schools specializing in.
We also have, as I mentioned, our management technology program (MOT). There
are only a few MBA programs in the U.S. that offer management of technology as a specialization.
We're the only one for which it's a joint program between the School of Business, the School of Engineering, and the School of Information Management.
In the MOT program, they're doing research projects with teams that are jointly staffed by MBAs and PhDs in Engineering and Information Management. We also have courses that have group projects with those interdisciplinary teams in subjects like new product development and new venture finance. The course in new product development is team-taught by an MBA faculty member who specializes in operations,
by an engineering faculty member, and by an instructor from the California College of Arts & Crafts.
The final project in that course requires students to actually work with a design student to develop a new product and then present the prototype of their product. They have a product fair at the end of the semester at which each of the teams displays prototypes of their products.
Can you talk about the role of "Experiential Learning" at Haas?
Experiential learning is very important in our program. I think it's something we've long been recognized for.
Probably the longest-running and most well-known of our experiential programs is the International Business Development Program, which students can apply for during their first year. We take 72 students a year into this program.
For those 72 students, it's one of their elective courses during the second semester. During that semester, they're assigned to a project team, typically with three of their classmates. (These are all MBAs in this program.) They're assigned to a consulting project that is being sponsored by a particular company or organization
and which is paying for the project.
It's not just a case study.
The students are assigned to a project, all of which are international. During the spring semester, they do their initial research on their project. When classes end for the summer, the team goes abroad on site for three weeks, finishes their research, and then each team produces a consulting report for their client.
Some of these IBD projects have had very significant outcomes.
For example, in the summer of '05, one of the teams was doing a project for a non-profit organization that was examining the feasibility of starting a meals program for elementary school children in Africa. This particular organization was concerned with educational outcomes. They discovered that one of the significant obstacles for elementary education in the countries in which they work was the fact that most of the children attending school were malnourished. Even when they made improvements in teaching methods and materials, they were not seeing
results because many of the children were so malnourished that they
couldn't focus on what was being presented.
The organization wanted a study addressing the feasibility of a pilot project to provide meals in a sustainable way – in other words, using food sources that were in the country, rather than relying on charitable aid from other countries. The IBD team that worked on this project really got into this project and put a lot of effort into it. The organization was so pleased with the results that they used the information as the basis for a presentation to the Gates Foundation, which is now funding this project for five years.
Of course, not all IBD projects get implemented. It depends on the company. But past projects have included everything from market-entry strategies for telecomm companies to more non-profit-organizational studies like the project that I just mentioned. The program has been a wildly popular experiential opportunity that we've had around for a number of years.
More recently, we have developed a joint program with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). We're the only university in the world that has this arrangement. As part of that partnership, we co-sponsor a conference each spring that has been named "Bridging the Digital Divide."
It is basically a UNIDO project designed to examine ways in which technology is being used to improve the standard of living in developing countries.
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