Dean’s Letters

Innovation is Thriving at UConn: From New Cancer Treatment to Wearable Technology

Posted on by John Elliott

School of Business, Partners Guide and Mentor Future Trailblazers

Over the years, I have often used entrepreneurship as a litmus test for the health of our School of Business and our University. Entrepreneurship is about creativity and innovation; it is about the grit and determination of our students. It fosters experiential learning and individual initiative.

We have continuously innovated and grown in how we support entrepreneurship at UConn over the last 30 years. We have been successful, and success has many parents. In this case, the “parents’’ range from the initial gifts from the Wolff Family to create a chaired position and a named competition in the 1990’s, to the support from the state for the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CCEI). And it did not stop there.

In 2012, alumnus Keith Fox ’80 funded the Innovation Quest (iQ) competition and committed his time, talent, and Rolodex to bringing the right skill and support to the program. We enlisted professor Rich Dino as a faculty leader and created courses and formalized a program available to all students at UConn. A few years later, entrepreneur Peter Werth saw the value of the proposition, and gave a large gift in support of this effort across the campus, creating the Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and helping us move the entrepreneurial experience earlier in the academic lives of our students. A freshman was successful in the iQ competition this year, side-by-side with Ph.D. students. Most recently alumna Toni Boucher ’02 MBA doubled down on this history by renaming the School’s management department as the Boucher Department of Management and Entrepreneurship. Today the Princeton Review rates us a leader among entrepreneurship programs at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Competition Brings Out the Best

On June 14, I had the pleasure of watching five student presentations from the iQ Summer InQbator program. This is an intensive, competitive, multi-week mentoring opportunity for the best competitors from the prior year. It has been my pleasure to participate for over a decade. I say participate, because there are opportunities to ask questions and explore exciting ideas presented by very thoughtful and well-coached students.

This year professor Kevin Gardiner assumed the leadership role, but neither Keith Fox nor Rich Dino stepped away from the program. All of them played a role in guiding and mentoring student teams along with an impressive cadre of alumni and friends. The summer program and the audience for Investor Day contained devoted groups of knowledgeable supporters, guides, and mentors.

In the best spirit of long-term commitment, a former iQ standout participant was there to report on his progress since graduation. He reported impressive progress in creating a viable, revenue-generating business. His message described the challenges and personal fulfillment of his work. He emphasized that you cannot listen to customers carefully enough. This theme was repeated by many presenters. Too many aspiring entrepreneurs see their idea as brilliant in the sense of, “if I build a better mousetrap, they will come.” But the message among these people was, “My goal must be to understand the pain points that my customers face. If I do not offer them solutions, I don’t have a viable product.”

Five Entrepreneurs Discuss Compelling Businesses

This year the five presenters were uniformly articulate and compelling. To illustrate the range of ideas offered and the range of talent in the investor/advisor audience I will mention each briefly.

The most technical was a breast-cancer intervention that involved using CRISPR technology to engage the patient’s own cells to create injectable agents to fight the cancer. As a reader, these simple sentences may seem like Greek, but in the room, there was ample expertise about CRISPR, and alternatives; there was ample expertise about the challenges the FDA-approval process offers, and informed conversation. The questions pushed these issues, and the answers assured us that the summer process and preparation was working.

A slightly (but only slightly) less technical proposal was to advance the state of the art for wearable sensor technology. Many of us today wear watches or other devices to measure effort levels, heart rates, or other bio markers. This company proposes an array of wearable products imprinted with electro-sensitive materials that will allow much more precise measurement of EKG and other markers that are often approximated by today’s technology. The innovation litany is better, cheaper, and faster and these proposals fit that model.

In the spirit of responding to customer needs, another proposal focused on mental health and facilitating connections between patients in need and service providers. At the University, the need for support for students in distress has never been higher, so this is both timely and relevant in response to an overwhelming need.

A first year Ph.D. student provided a consumer product idea. She started by pointing out that UGGs (boot-footwear) get dirty and are hard to clean and are not as warm or waterproof as they could be. Engaging her Mongolian roots, she envisions customizable warmer waterproof footwear, made to order without major inventory management needs. Her high-end, attractive product is slated for market this fall.

Our youngest competitor to reach this stage just completed her first year at UConn. In the spirit of wearable technology, she has designed an innovative mouthguard to detect concussions, internal bleeding, skull fractures, and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTEs). As the evidence mounts on health challenges to athletes exposed to repetitive concussions and head injury, there is no question that this is a market need. She observed that it is common for athletes with possible head injuries to assure their coaches that they are fine, even when they aren’t, because they want to return to the game.

This awareness of human behavior and incentives is important in the entrepreneurial journey. The summer program includes attention to emotional intelligence. Successful entrepreneurs must understand their customers and the pain points they face. But they must also understand and engage the investing community and the multiple collaborators and partners with whom they will work.

Stay tuned! We will do this again next year and these great ideas will move forward and give back in the best UConn tradition.

 

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New Year, Bright Future

Posted on by John Elliott

One of the seasonal greetings I received recently wished me “Love, Light & Everything Bright.” It made me smile, and reminded me that this is the time of year for upbeat messages of good cheer. Most often the message celebrates family and friends and special moments. The greeting evoked several upbeat messages of recent days. Let me share them, focusing on our UConn School of Business, Connecticut, and the world.

At the School of Business, we just concluded a strong year and a robust semester. Many new programs and efforts are underway, new degree programs are being created, some departments have been restructured, and our students are thriving and successful.

The COVID pandemic had a remarkable impact, some good, some definitely not so good. Our newest students suffered during their final years of high school, but are recovering nicely with strong support and encouragement from our faculty and staff. During that time, we learned how to take maximum advantage of virtual platforms for education, and have launched a fully online MBA and transformed other programs. Our students have more options, more focused tutorials, and other support for learning, built on what we discovered during COVID.

Importantly, while the popular press cannot get past doom-and-gloom assessments about the status of higher education and the “irrelevance” of education to personal growth, happiness, and success, our applications continue to soar. Young people still see education as a pathway to a brighter future. And at UConn, applications to the School of Business in Storrs are up 33 percent since last year.

In the School of Business, we embrace our role as an agent of economic growth and success within the state. We work with companies, the legislature, the governor, local communities, and non-profits to grow our future. Perceptions of the state of Connecticut’s economy have not kept up with an improving reality. Tax revenues have grown, enabling the state to refill its contingency funds while paying down some long-standing, underfunded pension obligations.

I recently attended a meeting of our Future Climate Venture Studio, a UConn initiative to identify, support and collaborate with startups addressing the most critical dimensions of the climate challenge. UConn President Radenka Maric and Dan O’Keefe, commissioner designate of the Department of Economic and Community Development, were featured speakers. People are aware of President Maric’s inspiring leadership around sustainability and climate change. She is leading UConn as a forerunner among universities in the quest for carbon neutrality. O’Keefe is a newcomer to Connecticut, whom the governor recruited. He spent 25 years in the private sector before being appointed to a newly created role as Chief Innovation Officer. Now he is heading up the DECD.

In a world with more choice for the workforce about where to live and work, O’Keefe asks: Why not work where the quality of life, the quality of education and the quality of health care is high? Both personally and professionally, I welcome this invitation to grow our state’s population with even more talent. He pointed out that last year, Connecticut was the seventh-fastest growing state by GDP in the union. In the last two years, our population growth points to a light and bright future.

At the world level, there is also a lightening and brightening in our future, although clouded by war and conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East. Future Crunch is a newsletter authored by economist and journalist Angus Hervey that just published “66 Good News Stories You Didn’t Hear About in 2023.” He reminds us that the 24-hour news cycle thrives on attention grabbing bad news that gets refined and updated minute by minute. Looked at closely, the bad news stories are usually urgent, short-term, attention-grabbing moments that, in the aggregate, feel like an inescapable, overwhelming worsening of the world. The headlines and news anchors bombard us with statements like: inflation is up, there was another mass shooting, the warming world is attacking us with tornados and droughts, and worse.

In contrast, Hervey looks back at the year 2023 and summarizes often surprisingly good news. The distinction between the minute-by-minute bad news and the reflection on a year of progress reminds me of the Martin Luther King quote: “….the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

There are 66 items in Hervey’s list and I will mention only a few. Since I just mentioned UConn’s sustainability focus and our Climate Studio, it is important to note how many of the 66 items are linked to sustainability, regulation of human polluting behavior, and the surprising progress being made. The production of electric vehicles; the shift to carbon-neutral solar, wind and geothermal sources, extreme reduction of reliance on fossil fuels …..all change the landscape in such a way that it is looking more and more likely that limiting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius may be possible.

The EV story is eye-opening. Global sales increased by 36 percent last year. Just two years ago, one in 25 cars sold was electric. This year one in five will be, and by 2025, one in two.

Global health is another good-news story. Polio, tuberculosis, river blindness, and HIV are but a few of the menaces against whom mankind is winning. It is not just vaccines and technology creating this revolution, but also good practices including clean water, breast feeding, prenatal care, support for birthing and more. Almost everywhere worldwide improvements continue. Beyond health, there are upticks in education, especially for young women. The overall instances of poverty are in sharp decline.

As we enter 2024, we at the School of Business wish you a wonderful year and the continued realization of these light and bright aspects to our collective future. We share our hopes that world leaders can find ways to moderate the conflicts that have the potential to imperil that future.

 

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Dean’s Report 2023

Posted on by John Elliott

Like so many members of UConn Nation, I cheered wildly for our men’s basketball team throughout March Madness, and when our players captured the NCAA Championship trophy in April.

And while every coach and player on that team contributed to an amazing season, I would be less than honest if I didn’t tell you I cheered just a little louder for guard Joey Calcattera, a member of our MBA cohort at the School of Business.

“Joey California’’ as he was fondly nicknamed by Coach Dan Hurley, and then the rest of the world, signed a basketball contract with the South Bay Lakers, the LA Lakers’ G-League team, last month.

Calcaterra’s continuing success is no surprise.

During a recent interview with the School of Business, he talked about how he chose UConn because he knew he would be “working his tail off’’ both on the basketball court and through his graduate coursework. It is that kind of persistence that creates champions!

I hope you’ll read more about Joey’s journey in the 2023 School of Business Dean’s Annual Report, beginning on page 4.

At the School of Business, we have more than 4,000 students all seeking their own championships—in business, in entrepreneurship, and in life.

Our report highlights their success, with 90 percent of our 2023 undergraduates employed or in graduate school within three months of graduation. Their employers, and their salaries, are equally impressive (page 17).

I hope the magazine will offer you a glimpse of our accomplishments, an introduction to some of our outstanding faculty (pages 7-9), and the alumni who are dedicated to our school (pages 10-11 and 14). Be sure to glance at our Words Worth Repeating (page 20), highlighting the wit and wisdom that we have shared and received throughout the year.

I want to thank you, our alumni and friends, for the many contributions you have made to the School of Business this past year. I am grateful for your support and encouragement of our students, and your partnership in our commitment to excellence in business education.

I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving, with the love and companionship of those you hold dear.

 

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Beyond the Curriculum: MBA Alumnus Offers Fascinating Insight Into Potential of Offshore Wind Farm

Posted on by John Elliott

One way to think about a college business degree is that it consists of 120-credit hours of course work, about half of which is study in the arts and sciences, and half in business courses. But students will tell you that the course work is only part of the growth opportunity that colleges provide in today’s world.

Beyond the course curriculum is a rich array of opportunities giving students incredible choices in experiences that will help them grow, thrive, and enjoy their college experience. Some are obvious, such as sports, the band, the student newspaper, social societies, and the like. Some are crafted living opportunities, such as the Business Connections Learning Community (BCLC), which provide programs that augment the student experience. The BCLC is a residential community in Belden Hall where students engage in significant, supportive programming, learning about everything from preparing a resume to becoming certified on the Bloomberg terminals. They host alumni who share insights about professional career paths and many agree to serve as mentors to our students.

There are many clubs focused on everything from accounting or finance to Formula 1 racing. Each of these clubs provides students the option to engage modestly or to become a leader with significant responsibility.

Alumnus’ Career Spanned From Military Service to Renewable Energy

Today I want to share a recent extracurricular event that exemplifies the richness and diversity available outside the classroom. On Oct. 20, alumnus Bryan Dougherty ’17 MBA was our guest speaker in the Sustainable Business Breakfast Series. Today’s students are sensitive to the environment and want to care for it, and learn about the many ways we can do so.

Bryan is an Operations Project Manager with Orsted, a Danish company that is launching offshore wind farms in New England. From my perspective Bryan played two roles. He exemplifies career progression, and he knows a great deal about green energy that the students want to learn.

Bryan is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at Westpoint. He served nine years as an active-duty U.S. Army officer and then transferred to the National Guard where he continues to serve part-time. Following active duty, he returned to civilian life, joining Sikorsky in Stratford, Conn. The company encouraged and supported him in getting an MBA at UConn. This prepared him for a series of increasingly demanding roles over nine years. He then joined Orsted, following
through on an internal career spark to get involved with renewables.

He shared with us the challenges of bringing offshore wind to New England. Orsted has been doing this in Europe for 25 years, and the company has the technology to do it well. Bryan emphasized that in these initiatives, track record and experience are critical. But every new location is distinct and understanding the local operating environment is needed to gain a sustainable foothold. Regulation and environments are different.

I was reminded of learning decades ago about efforts to build long-distance transmission lines in the United States. The industry pointed out how much easier it was in communist countries or countries with other regulatory environments. In our country, every state, county, and municipality has property rights over regulatory approvals. The challenge is not only about whether projects will be approved but also about how long it takes to earn approval. In the United States, NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) is a potent barrier to approval of even the most logical initiatives. Getting energy from water-powered electricity to consumers was no easier than getting wind-powered electricity to consumers.

One Turn of the Blade Could Power a Home for 24 Hours

These wind turbines are huge, producing at an 11-megawatt capacity; where one blade turn is enough to power a home for one day. These offshore wind turbines are much larger than their land-based turbine siblings. Maintenance will require technicians to go up elevators inside them to service the mechanics. The technicians must get from land-based homes to the water-based generators. There are whales to protect, birds to worry about, and more. Launching these devices will be a mammoth effort, and Bryan referred to New London as the “Cape Canaveral’’ of New England offshore wind power. Once launched, these generators are expected to have a 35-year lifespan, and there are several entities involved ensuring the New London region remains an important hub during that timeframe, including the eventual decommissioning of the wind farms.

The proposed wind farms will generate sufficient electricity to power 900,000 homes, with future bids on the horizon to bring new offshore wind farms online in the next 10 years. The process involves companies bidding to access offshore sites for turbine installation, and the project is moving forward. But recently plans have been disrupted by the rising interest rates, which imperil the viability of large capital projects. The wind-farm projects are one of many examples of potential moderation of man-made climate change, and the difficulty in implementation reminds us of the challenges.

Bryan tied back to his MBA learnings, specifically with international business and operations management courses. He is seeing first-hand how understanding the local operating environment is imperative to business success. He is also applying operational design tools taught in his graduate class to apply to the current operations and maintenance strategy for Orsted’s New England projects. He is experiencing this with a job and company he loves, where he’s following through on an internal spark that was lit 15 years ago.

Bryan intends to support the School of Business’ Global Business Leadership in Sustainability Summit on March 1st, 2024 in Storrs, and hopes to see Husky Nation turn out to learn more about the impact of renewables on our state and the region.

To learn more about the summit, please visit global.business.uconn.edu.

 

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Sustainability Summit Blended the Hope and Challenges of Environmental Change for Forward-Looking Audience

Posted on by John Elliott

A key goal of the School of Business is to convene important conversations among faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends. On March 24, we hosted our second- annual Global Business Leadership in Sustainability Summit. This half-day event to explore ESG issues drew a wide array of talent.

It was my pleasure to start the program with a conversation with Dinah Koehler, the head of ESG Research at FactSet. Dinah is no stranger to UConn, having met with our Student Managed Fund students last fall to discuss ESG. At the summit, we tackled pressing questions around sustainability, reporting practices, and regulation. Next, multiple panels including students, alumni, and UConn faculty delved into other pertinent ESG issues.

ESG stands for Environment, Social, and Governance, three important dimensions of our economic lives. In recent decades, many investors and companies have moved past profit maximization as the sole criteria for managing their companies and their investments. They have integrated ESG issues into their decision-making. For some companies, their commitment to ESG is about emphasizing these issues relative to their business model. For others, their ESG focus is a way to communicate to the investing community not only corporate values, but also about the risks and rewards of investing in the company’s stock.

A Legacy of Environmental Reliance at Risk

Dinah put the story in perspective by reminding us that humanity’s prosperity in the last several hundred years was built on a stability of climate regarding temperature, that enabled agricultural success and importantly, stability of ocean levels. This stable environment has been the cornerstone for economic progress, and now these historic realities are at significant risk.

Concerns about the environment and human influence on earth’s sustainability go back to Malthus. At the end of the 1700s, he cautioned that the natural growth of human population would exceed the ability of our planet to feed everyone. Happily, decades of agricultural innovation have sustained population growth. Recently however, the tension between people and planet has intensified. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the Club of Rome’s landmark report, ‘The Limits to Growth’ – which stressed our planet’s interconnected systems. Of paramount concern is their predication that if growth trends in population, industrialization, resource use, and pollution continued unchanged, we will reach, and then overshoot the carrying capacity of the Earth within the next 100 years.

Companies Tend to ‘Cherry Pick’ Their Stories

More recently, the environmental threats have accelerated and despite the global gnashing of teeth, we are making insufficient progress to alter the overheating of our planet. The ESG focus is a response to these issues, in the spirit of what-gets measured-gets-better. Europe has led the way in requiring company disclosures about their environmental footprint, and U.S. companies have begun to engage in reporting. But a key concern around the world is the reliability and verifiability of disclosures. The phrase “greenwashing” has emerged to reflect company tendencies cherry pick the stories to tell in voluntary disclosures. Companies craft their narrative in a favorable light, emphasizing the positives and ignoring the problems.

The costs and difficulty of verifying these disclosures rather naturally spawned a small industry of firms that rank/measure/assess companies’ ESG characteristics. That industry fed another industry of companies offering ESG-friendly investment portfolios. Our conversation at the conference addressing ESG sustainability as an assessment of what these innovations are delivering, what they could deliver, how they could be improved, and what the future might look like.

Mandated Government Reports Provide Critical Information

ESG measurements and rankings are numerous and diverse in nature, including for example risk analysts MSCI. The basis of these measurements and rankings is information that companies report about their ESG profile. For example, what kinds of environmental risks do they face and how do they mitigate them? The “better” firms report more, but many critics argue that these firms “greenwash” their efforts. The data is not easily verifiable. An alternative reporting structure based on ESG activity drawn from mandated government reporting would yield reliable and verifiable data. Companies are required to fully disclose hazardous spills, train derailments, air traffic mishaps, accidents in the workplace, and the like. Today, these measures are less commonly the basis of an ESG ranking system, but such a system would be more credible.

From an investing perspective, some investors focus on maximizing their returns, and ask the question, “Is an ESG portfolio likely to deliver high(er) returns? Is an ESG portfolio likely to deliver lower risk (lower variability of returns).” Other investors have value-based agendas for their investments, and for example, prefer a portfolio that doesn’t hold tobacco stocks, or gun stocks, or fossil-fuel stocks. The important question is whether current ESG rankings provide relevant information for these questions.

The day of our symposium, MSCI (one of the most visible ranking activities for ESG that relies on firm reporting) announced that they were downgrading ESG ratings on thousands of funds. As reported in the Financial Times, “the changes are part of a push by index providers to tighten the criteria for ESG-compliant funds.” Especially in Europe, a triple-A ESG rating is required by many portfolio managers and this MSCI change is projected to reduce the number of triple-A companies from 1,120 to just 54, while the number with no rating will surge from 24 to 462.

Doing the Right Thing

In the last 50 years, science has made a case for global warming, and many countries have embraced the importance of action to ameliorate the CO2 and other pollutants accelerating the warming path. Good intentions have been expressed, but actions and investments have been insufficient to significantly slow the path. Awareness is critical, and ESG measurements support awareness. The clock is ticking.

We have witnessed many successes of businesses “doing the right thing.” Sixty years ago, the ozone layer was severely threatened, and SC Johnson, the parent company of Johnson Wax, responded by removing the destructive propellants from its products. Shortly thereafter, the government banned those propellants. Recently the press has acknowledged that the ozone layer has largely recovered. By all accounts, our challenge today is bigger and much more complicated, but there is hope.

Our second Global Business Leadership in Sustainability Summit brought attention to the issues of ESG measurement and investing, but also specific conversations more local to UConn and Connecticut. One panel led by alumnus Brian Paganini discussed the significant challenges of food waste in Connecticut. Brian’s company, Quantum Biopower, converts food waste into green energy and provides compost as a byproduct.

Professor Richard Meinart, Center Coordinator at UConn Extension, reminded us that not all compost is perfect for all uses. In Connecticut, our ground is over-burdened with phosphorous, and Quantum Biopower’s compost is phosphorous rich. This reminds us that the details matter, and Quantum will be challenged to find a way to mitigate phosphorous or treat their compost as an export product to other states.

Our other panels featured students and recent graduates who shared their UConn and professional experiences in the ESG space. They reminded all of us about the importance of bringing passion to address the ESG challenges what we will continue to face.

Indeed, our Summit was a rich and rewarding day – an important conversation that we must and will emulate.

 

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Today’s Business Students Believe Embracing People, Planet Are Essential Elements of Corporate Success

Posted on by John Elliott

School’s Second Annual Sustainability Summit on March 24 Open to Alumni, Friends of UConn

We often do not think deeply enough about the domain of education. It is certainly about reading, writing, and arithmetic taught to our youngest learners as tools to enable them to learn more and explore more and grow more. As they move through their lives, the intellectual challenges evolve and the depth of their study and understanding grow apace. It has been my privilege to work in university settings for most of my adult life, among colleagues pursuing the next big idea and challenging received wisdom, while incorporating their innovations into writing, textbooks, and teaching.

In the Business School at UConn, we are constantly rethinking and revising our curriculum to focus on what is important. An example of a long-term evolution is the Friedman Doctrine. In 1970, University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman published an article in the New York Times declaring that a business does not have any social responsibility to society beyond serving its shareholders. The notion was that profit maximization arose from the most efficient use of resources and as the profits were realized and distributed to the shareholders, the shareholders had the ability to use these returns as they wished to support socially important needs. This idea was embraced in business schools and became a foundational principle for finance. It also drove a bit of a wedge between the schools of business and scholars at their universities.

Triple Bottom Line Embraces Profits and More

Over the ensuing 50 years, many challenges to this doctrine emerged. Today there is the notion of a “triple bottom line” that suggests value maximization is not just about profit, but also includes people and the planet. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and investing based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes have emerged as a growing area of interest for our students and the companies who recruit them. Educators and employers know that the younger workforce of today cares about how their employer serves its community and the planet.

At UConn, our students are passionate about our planet and preserving it for their children and grandchildren. The Aspen Institute ranks UConn among the Top 10 universities addressing environmental issues, but our students want more. UConn President Radenka Maric recently responded by pledging carbon neutrality for the campus by 2030. The clock is ticking.

For our part, the School of Business is convening our second annual Global Business Leadership in Sustainability Summit on March 24 for students to learn more about this rapidly growing area and to meet alumni and corporate partners. Alumni and friends of UConn are welcome to attend.

Critical Thinking, Cultural Awareness Key to Business Education

The School of Business is often thought of as Milton Friedman’s apostles, where the profit motive rules supreme. Not true. Our colleagues in Arts and Sciences sometimes forget that half of undergraduate coursework in the business school is in the arts and sciences and many of our courses mandate both critical thinking and cultural awareness. Moreover, in the last several decades CSR, the environment, human rights, and other balance points for profit maximization have moved to the forefront of our curriculum. But they are balance points. The core notion that efficient allocation of resources to produce goods and services at low cost is one we embrace and we educate students in how to accomplish that.

For example, UConn has a Business and Human Rights Initiative, something that is unusual in higher education. The business school partners with the University’s Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute to develop and promote programs and activities that raise attention and awareness to global abuses of human rights. We will soon be launching a master’s degree and a set of certificates built around CSR. We expect many of our MBA students to make a subset of these experiences part of their education. In fact, our new MBA Now courses will offer a special series of elective courses in 2023-24 focused on sustainability and the supply chain. At the university level, in response to student interest, we have changed the common core that everyone must take to include an environmental course.

Humanitarian Benevolence Varies Greatly

In educating our students, one important objective is perspective. They must be able to evaluate “doctrines” thoughtfully and dispassionately. “Doctrines” by the nature of the word are belief systems that are extolled by groups, often religious or political. This notion is antithetical to the university. The Friedman Doctrine is appealing and simple. But it misses a great deal. It is built on an assumption of perfect markets and informed, benevolent citizens.

The perfect market assumption fails because of positive and negative externalities. Companies seeking to maximize profits make self-serving decisions when the costs of their polluting activity do not fall on them—a negative externality produces positive profit for the enterprise. The neighborhood bears the cost of bad water, etc. Informed benevolent citizens is also a failed assumption. In the USA today, we have familiar examples of people who have pledged the majority of their extreme wealth to nonprofits. Buffett, Gates (Bill and Melinda), Bloomberg, and Bezos follow in the path of Carnegie, Ford, Morgan, and Vanderbilt. But other uber-wealthy individuals have no apparent social conscience. So, the Friedman Doctrine is built on shaky ground that fails to incorporate externalities and overstates a shared humanitarian objective for those who benefit from (and influence) government policy.

The School of Business is committed to providing a curriculum that explores these important ideas, requires students to evaluate the nuances of ideas and opportunities, and gives them license to learn what they want to learn to enhance their future. We have launched a series of new programs that give students more license to choose their path. And we seek to engage them in open dialogue about not only efficient allocation of resources but also thoughtful investment in the future of our economy.

 

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Revised UConn MBA Program Allows Students Flexibility In Achieving Goals

Posted on by John Elliott

There is a narrative around higher education that it is ossified and unchanging. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the UConn School of Business is testimony to the dynamic nature of higher education. Today I am excited to share several major changes in our programs. The biggest is the realignment of our MBA programs.

Specifically, we are reducing the number of required credit hours by 25% to better align our offerings with our competitors. We are also eliminating the requirement that students must complete a concentration. Taken together, these changes give our students greater control over what they study, and allow them to tailor their program to knowledge required for their chosen career path. These changes give more decision making and autonomy to our students and reduce mandatory requirements of the degree programs.

Historically, concentrations were deep learning in core areas such as finance, accounting, management, marketing, or management information. Today the world is changing, and aspiring professionals seek targeted knowledge and more diverse opportunities. Rather than a deep-dive concentration in finance, they may seek some data analytics and some project management. Our revised curriculum opens these doors to allow students to design the program of study that they seek, and their employer may prefer.

The core curriculum is little changed. The total credit hours are reduced, which shortens the time to degree and the program’s cost. The reduced electives allow students to tailor their education to their needs. As work lives grow longer and the pace of change accelerates, we expect the notion of life-long learning to grow apace. Young professionals and their employers will look for periodic enhancement of their skills and knowledge. UConn will stand ready to provide shorter updates on important topics in the form of certificates, badges, or other affirmations of additional knowledge.

In the last few years, and especially in response to COVID, we have learned how important flexibility is to our students. In response, we have created a fully online MBA offering. Equally important, we have enabled students to seamlessly combine some courses in the online format and some courses in a face-to-face modality as the demands of their personal and professional lives dictate.

Our admissions professionals are ready to talk with interested candidates about how these changes may affect their plans.

 

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Helping Family-Owned Businesses Excel

Posted on by John Elliott

As the semester draws to a close there is much to reflect upon. I am grateful every day for the engagement and involvement of UConn School of Business alumni.

As we engage together, I often hear, “I didn’t know you did that!” Here is a recent example of something we do that most don’t know.

Our Family Business Program focuses on the special issues confronted by family businesses. We create a forum for people with shared interests to exchange ideas, explore alternatives, and engage with each other and other business experts.

Family businesses have all the problems of any business. But they also face the inherent family dynamics that arise from family members reporting to each other. How do you confront the difficult conversation when you fire a cousin? How do you ensure that important, non-family professionals feel included and respected? Perhaps this is just another layer of complexity in managing complex organizations. But it is a very important, distinct, and thick layer.

The Family Business Program, under the guidance of our Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, presented a workshop on business transition last month, featuring a distinguished panel of experts who shared their knowledge and experiences.

Let me share a few of the key ideas with you:

  • Family leaders will determine how much to emphasize family, and how much to prioritize business success. Rather than pushing for optimal profitability, they may decide to satisfice on the business side by earning just enough to support the family and involve as many family members as desired. This can be a comfortable equilibrium.
  • In generational transitions, the comfortable satisficing choice often gives way to a profit-maximizing choice. The generation in control sees a future after leaving the company, and wants to maximize their resources when the transition happens. The next generation may want to continue the business but does not want to pay too much, even to mom and dad. Independent outside acquirers are even less willing to overpay.
  • A consensus emerged that “transition” covers a three-to five-year time frame, during which satisficing accommodations need to be replaced with professional business patterns, such as an independent board of directors and accomplished professionals in all key positions.
  • The panel also talked about the four “D”s….. Divorce, Death, Disability and Disagreement. These bring an immediate sense of urgency to the transition decision and deny the 3- to 5-year period to optimize the exit value. They also quoted results that only one in five of the companies that engage investment banks to sponsor an auction have a successful sale. Worse yet, they reported that 75% of owners who exited reported being unhappy a year later.

It is indeed a tangled web we weave and there are many ways for family business transitions to go wrong. Two things stood out to me: the need for open, honest communication within the family, but also within the business to set the stage for the business to evolve. Another take-away was that “you cannot read the label from inside the bottle.” There is certainly a tendency for all of us to think we know what we need to know, but the value of an independent outside assessment cannot be overstated. Transitions are better when supported by some independent confirmations of where the business stands and what its future can look like.

The Family Business Program welcomes new members. To learn more about it, please visit: https://ccei.uconn.edu/family-business-program/

 

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Dean’s Annual Report Celebrates Many Accomplishments of Previous Year

Posted on by John Elliott

Today I’d like to introduce you to a few of the outstanding students at the UConn School of Business, the many achievements of our faculty, and the myriad of successes we have celebrated in the past 12 months.

In the pages of this year’s Dean’s Annual Report, you will read about Rashana Weerasinghe, who is completing her ninth (that’s right, ninth!) internship as a UConn student, this time at Amazon Robotics in Boston, where she is helping the company meet its sustainability goals.

You will also meet Linbing Pan, featured on our cover, who had an incredible summer internship at Nordstrom. During an introduction to alumnus Mike Koppel ’78, the former executive vice president and CFO of Nordstrom, Linbing expressed his passion for fashion and his interest in corporate management. Mike was able to advise Linbing on steps he could take to advance his interests.

These are just two of our many outstanding students who are pursuing active business experiences as part of their UConn journey. Our carefully designed and individualized advising program prepares our students for meaningful internships that are stepping stones to successful careers. Our well-connected faculty, successful alumni, and other friends of UConn give them the skills that they need, so when they land a big interview, they are ready to impress. Their stories begin on page 6.

Our business programs continue to produce outstanding results, with 88 percent of our Class of 2022 undergraduates securing jobs, entering graduate programs, or joining the military within three months of commencement. Be sure to see our top employers, rankings, and our placement statistics on pages 16-17.

Our faculty continue to make great strides in research that has real-world impact. In this issue, we feature three of our Operations and Information Management researchers who are tackling issues that impact us all, including how insurance companies can identify safe drivers, how the trucking industry can be more efficient, and how supply-chain management can be enhanced by lessons learned in the pandemic. Their work is featured on pages 26-29.

Our students are keenly focused on the intersection of business and society, seeking opportunities to learn and apply their interest in sustainability, corporate responsibility, and climate action. Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) influences business strategy and investors today more than ever, and we are meeting that need with a variety of programs and experiences. On pages 30-31, you will meet faculty and recent alumni who are making strides to elevate the social conscience of business.

I hope you enjoy reading about the highlights of a busy, exciting, and productive year. As I write this, Thanksgiving season is upon us. We have much to celebrate and many people for whom we are grateful. I wish each of you a holiday season of personal joy, professional satisfaction, and the abundant love of those you hold dear.

 

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Harvard Economist To Speak at UConn on Business Implications of Climate Change Policies

Posted on by John Elliott

As dean of the Business School, one of my goals is to convene important conversations.

That is why I wish to invite you to join the UConn community for a presentation on climate change policy presented by Professor Robert N. Stavins, the A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy & Economic Development at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

A provocative speaker, Stavins’ topic is: “What Can an Economist Possibly Have to Say about Climate Change Policy?’’ His presentation begins at 4 p.m. Oct. 13 at the Dodd Center for Human Rights. The program will also be livestreamed; you can find a link here the day of the event.

“Attendees will come to understand what an economic perspective on climate change and climate-change policy has to offer,’’ Stavins said. “Business students and corporate executives should be attuned to climate-change policies because those policies will present very significant costs for some firms, and huge financial opportunities for other firms.’’

Stavins is the director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a University Fellow of Resources for the Future, and a former Chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Economics Advisory Board.

He directed Project 88, a national, bipartisan effort to develop innovative approaches to environmental problems. He has been a consultant to government agencies, international organizations, corporations, and advocacy groups.

In March, he will lead a week-long program on climate change, energy and policymaking for the long-term, convening policymakers and corporate leaders from around the world to discover the science, economics, and policy of climate change, as well as related aspects of energy production and use.

The School of Business is one of the many entities on campus that help to fund, publicize, and participate in this program, which is part of the Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series. The series honors the legacy of a prominent American naturalist, photographer, and writer who helped bridge the gap between the conservation and ecological movements of the 20th century. An eclectic thinker, Teale won the Pulitzer for his nature writing. In fact, his book on the pesticide DDT helped inform Rachel Carlson’s “Silent Spring,’’ which was credited for advancing the global environmental movement when it was published in 1962.

We are proud to extend his vision.

UConn is a ‘Green Campus,’ and we work to soften our carbon footprint consistently. UConn is making investments regularly to do that, although many in our community say it is too slow. The Aspen Institute, a collection of scholars, nonpartisan thought leaders, and other experts eager to address some of the world’s most complex problems, has said we are near the top in our efforts. This is a healthy tension. And conversations like this one help inform those on both sides of the debate. But that only happens when people come, listen and engage.

So please join us.

By doing so you foster your personal knowledge and growth and you underscore the importance of these issues to you and to our community.

In the School of Business, we often say that the goal of education is to help each of us reach our potential. We are here to help our students and alumni intentionally work toward that personal goal and to contribute to making the world a better place.

Please join us. You will be glad you did.

 

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