More than 50% of the ranking is based on responses of full-time MBA alumni from the class of 2014 who report on their current salaries, career progression, and satisfaction with their MBA. Haas alumni salaries have been getting stronger, even relative to peer competitors.
For example, Haas alumni report this year that their salaries rose 104% between when they started business school and three years after graduation. In 2016, that growth was 94%. In addition, the Financial Times reported an increase in current annual salaries three years post-MBA to $176,167, making these Haas alumni the 6th highest paid MBAs in the world. These two factors accounted for 40% of the overall ranking.
In other noteworthy categories, Haas ranked:
9th worldwide in the effectiveness of career services
9th worldwide in alumni who say they’ve achieved their aims
11th worldwide in alumni who would recommend Berkeley Haas
13th in faculty research worldwide
4th highest placement of PhD graduates at top 50 business schools ranked by the FT
Additional rankings factors include the gender and international diversity of the full-time MBA student body, faculty, and board of advisors as well as the international mobility of MBA students. See the full report along with details on the methodology.
In similar rankings, Haas came in #7 in US News and World Report and #7 in the Economist Which MBA ranking. Currently two of the Haas School’s six degree programs are ranked #1 in their category (Evening & Weekend MBA and Master of Financial Engineering).
It’s the fifth honorary doctorate for Teece, known for his pioneering work on innovation, technological change, and strategic management.
“David Teece stands at the enviable juncture of outstanding academic achievement and compelling business success, and with much justification describes himself on his website as a ‘scholar entrepreneur,'” said Edinburgh Business School Prof. Heather McGregor, at the laureation ceremony on Nov. 15.
McGregor noted that Teece’s work has received more than 122,000 citations on Google Scholar, with over 100 of his publications having been cited more than 100 times each. “Numbers alone do not do justice to the lasting influence he has had on scholarship in the fields of technological change, strategic management, and intellectual property rights,” McGregor said.
She mentioned in particular his landmark 1986 work on innovation and his 1997 paper that introduced the concept of dynamic capabilities—the idea that the ability of enterprises to react adequately and promptly to external changes requires a combination of abilities.
“The insights and analyses in these papers are now so much part of the fabric of modern managerial thought that they can seem rather obvious today to students beginning their business studies,” she said. “However, a colleague once remarked that David Teece has the gift of stating principles that seem obvious—until you realize that no one has ever stated them before.”
Teece, the Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business at Berkeley Haas, is faculty director of the Tusher Center for The Management of Intellectual Capital. In addition to a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, he holds honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand; St. Petersburg State University, Russia; Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; and Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland.
In addition to his scholarly work, Teece is the co-founder of the Berkeley Research Group, a global strategic advisory and expert consulting firm with 40 offices and over 1000 employees worldwide. The New Zealand native also holds significant investments in real estate and started a successful winery.
Watch a documentary of 2017 WISE Prize for Education recipient Patrick Awuah, MBA 99, founder and president of Ashesi University in Ghana.
Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, chairperson of Qatar Foundation, presented the prize to Awuah on Nov. 15 at the Opening Plenary session of the 8th World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar, before an audience of 2,000 people from 100 countries.
The ranking is an amalgam of the five most influential MBA rankings published this year. Each is separately weighted to account for Poets and Quants’ view of its credibility, its web site states.
The weightings go as follows:
35% for U.S. News, where Haas ranked #7
25% for Forbes, where Haas ranked #9
15% for The Financial Times, where Haas ranked #7 among US schools
15% for Businessweek, where Haas ranked #11, and
10% for The Economist, where Haas ranked #7 among US schools
Poets & Quants considers US schools only in its ranking. Last year, Berkeley Haas ranked #8.
The ranking is one of many rankings of full-time MBA programs by the media. The Full-time Berkeley MBA Program was also ranked #7 this year by U.S. News & World Report.
Since Adj. Prof. Henry Chesbrough wrote his pioneering 2003 book, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, the concept has become a mainstay of corporate strategists and product developers around the world.
Next month, leading thinkers will gather in San Francisco to discuss the latest trends—including the rise of machine learning and the development of new business models to enhance collaborative strategies—at the 4th Annual World Open Innovation Conference.
Open innovation calls for companies to make much greater use of external ideas and technologies in their own business and, in turn, give outsiders to their unused internal ideas.
Keynote speakers at the conference include:
David J. Teece, director of the Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital at Berkeley Haas
Arati Prabhakar, former director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
William Ruh, SVP & chief digital officer for GE, and CEO of GE Digital
Thomas Kalil, former deputy director of policy, The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy
Chesbrough, faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, will chair the event, to be held Dec. 13-15 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront.
We asked Chesbrough a few questions in preparation for the conference.
Who should attend?
Anybody who is interested in growth should attend. You’ll see new models of growth that leverage more knowledge from external resources, making innovation faster and more efficient. We expect managers from Europe, Japan, China, and India, and of course, many American companies.
Who will be speaking at the conference?
The mix of speakers is not what you’d typically see at most conferences. The chief digital officer of GE will discuss the digital transformation of his company, and keynote speakers who headed DARPA and held a leading position in the White House Office of Technology and Science will explain how the principles of open innovation can be shared with governments and public entities. David Teece, director of UC Berkeley’s Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital, will tie these themes together and explain why competitive advantage in the 21st century will be based on the ability to mobilize external resources.
What will this year’s conference cover?
We’ll focus on lessons learned by state, local, and national governments that have used open innovation to inform and strengthen the policy-making process. Traditionally the policy world talks to itself, or uses consultants to push ideas out to the world. But the world can participate directly in the formation of the policies and give feedback on execution. We will also see the latest academic research on open innovation, and experience challenges from leading companies who are trying to make it work in practice.
Can you provide a memorable insight from an earlier conference?
There’s one particular story from NASA. With budgets shrinking and a trip to Mars on the drawing board, NASA was turning to open innovation to solve the immense problems of interplanetary travel. The agency even crowdsourced the design for a new space suit. But, as attendees at the World Open Innovation Conference in 2014 learned, the new approach to innovation unsettled long-time employees of the space agency. Scientists at NASA went through an identity crisis. They asked, “When we go outside to ask citizens for their input what happens to me?” That’s just one example of a challenge in adapting to open innovation.
What are some trends that you are watching in open innovation?
Open innovation is moving into the realm of artificial intelligence. Machine learning and deep learning involve training machines with sets of data, and the more data you have the better the training. Open innovation holds that it is quite possible to aggregate disparate data sources from multiple, collaborating organizations.
Sharing data and sharing services creates value and new sources of revenue. But opening a business to outside partners requires the development of new business models. Firms need to find ways to manage the move to the new digital technologies that are reshaping the economy.
Why does open innovation matter as much today as it did when you developed the paradigm?
There is so much useful knowledge in so many places that it is a mistake to generate and protect your own knowledge to the exclusion of outside sources. It is much smarter to take advantage of that external knowledge and then add the pieces of internal knowledge that brings it to life and connects it together to deliver business value.
It’s easy enough to find a computer science class that covers the bits and bytes behind blockchain—the global digital ledger that’s linked and secured using cryptography. More difficult is finding a curriculum that tackles the potentially disruptive business, legal, and regulatory implications of the complex new technology.
That’s about to change, as Berkeley Haas in spring 2018 offers a cross-listed class to business, engineering and law students. Called “Blockchain and the Future of Technology, Business, and Law,” the new course will provide an overview of the technology behind blockchain and explore the huge range of current and potential real-world applications.
“Blockchain is one of the most significant technologies to impact business in many years, but there’s a lack of understanding about what it means to business and law,” said Haas Lecturer Greg La Blanc. “Engineering students think that money simply grows on bits, but have no idea what the business model is. Law and business students are confused about the technology.
Greg La Blanc
The course is limited to 60 students, 20 each from Haas, Berkeley Engineering, and Berkeley Law. They’ll work in mixed teams of six to produce a proposal for a workable blockchain-related business plan by semester’s end.
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is a decentralized and encrypted method of tracking digital assets. It’s designed to operate without any central company or government in charge, so that no single party can change records they didn’t create. Blockchain is often associated with digital currencies such as Bitcoin—but the technology covers far wider territory. Blockchains are being used to do everything from protecting digital identities in Estonia to removing contaminated turkeys from the supply chain in Texas—and it’s become a trendy investment in Silicon Valley.
La Blanc, who teaches finance and strategy at Haas, is the course co-founder, along with Adam Sterling, executive director of the law school’s Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy, and Engineering Professor Dawn Song, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. All three will teach during throughout the course, along with engineering post-doc Raymond Cheng.
Sterling, JD/MBA 13, who enrolled in La Blanc’s finance class as a Berkeley MBA student, said the two have stayed in touch, working on various projects since he left. The new course came out of a meeting the two held with Song. “We saw so much overlap in what we were doing,” Sterling said.
Adam Sterling
La Blanc said the 15-week course will include lectures on topics such as the history of money and currency, the founding of Bitcoin, and the stories behind the industry experts who are building cryptocurrency products. The course will include a variety of guest speakers.
Pitching to VCs
By the end of the course, each student team will create a blockchain-related business plan “that is technically feasible and regulatory compliant,” Sterling said. Members of the VC community will judge the students’ pitch decks and their computer code, as well as their legal memos.
Interest in the course and in blockchain across campus is strong. Blockchain at Berkeley, founded a year ago, now has 100 members and more than 1,600 people participating in the club’s events and activities, says Ashley Lannquist, MBA 18, one of the group’s consulting managers.
“Students see this as a very impactful emerging technology that will play large role in the future, and they want to understand it and effectively participate,” Lannquist says.
“Blockchain does have the potential to be a really disruptive technology for many industries,” Sterling said. “There’s a lot of excitement around the early applications, but we’re especially excited for the long-term implications and that’s what we want to equip our students to understand.”
Bloomberg published its annual Businessweek Full-time MBA ranking today, ranking Berkeley Haas #11, compared to #10 last year.
Haas performed strongly in several areas, ranking #2 for the second year in the alumni survey and #5 (up from #7 last year) in the student survey.
Haas ranked #10 in starting salaries and #36 in job placement based on 90% of the FTMBA Class of 2016 accepting jobs by three months after graduation. Haas ranked #25 in the employer survey which measures how well graduates perform on the job and weighs more strongly the responses of large employers who hire greater numbers of MBAs from different schools.
The final rank is based on the following weightings:
35% employer survey rank
30% alumni survey rank based on a survey of the FTMBA Classes of 2009, 2010, and 2011
15% student survey rank of the FTMBA Class of 2017
10% salary rank based on the average base salary post MBA
10% job placement rank based on job acceptances three months after graduation
National Energy Finance CompetitionA special 60th anniversary issue of California Management Review features seven articles by Berkeley Haas faculty exploring different aspects of leadership—from incentives for innovation to recognizing women’s unique qualities as negotiators.
The articles in the Fall 2017 journal issue not only show the breadth of Haas faculty research, but also reflect the school’s increasing focus on leadership, writes editor and Prof. Emeritus David Vogel, in the introduction. Haas culture is codified in four defining leadership principles: Question the Status Quo; Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always and Beyond Yourself.
“Each of the Haas School’s four defining principles are essentially about dimensions of leadership,” Vogel said.
As the Haas School’s quarterly peer-reviewed journal, California Management Review serves as bridge of communication between those who study management and those who practice it.
The journal opens with research by Prof. Don Moore pointing out that decades of research on hiring indicates that face-to-face job interviews are terrible at predicting future performance—yet companies continue to use them. In “How to Improve the Accuracy and Reduce the Cost of Personnel Selection,” Moore shows that there more effective and efficient alternatives, including structuring interviews around tests of key skills and abilities.
In “Creating Incentives for Innovation,” Prof. Gustavo Manso presents research demonstrating how employees can be encouraged to experiment by creating incentive systems that both tolerate early failures and reward long-term performance.
Prof. Laura Kray, who has long studied gender differences, writes that women possess unique advantages as negotiators—including stronger ethics and higher levels of cooperation. Yet women still face stereotypes of being poor advocates for themselves. “Changing the Narrative: Women as Negotiators—and Leaders,” co-authored by Jessica A. Kennedy of Vanderbilt University, presents practical strategies for managers and negotiators to change the narrative and close performance gaps.
In “Who’s Really Doing the Work? The Impact of Group Size on Over-Claiming of Responsibility,” Asst. Prof. Juliana Schroeder explores a pervasive phenomenon in today’s workplaces: people believing that they’ve done more than their fair share of work. The article looks at predictors of “over-claiming,” and presents practical steps that managers can use to reduce the damaging effects.
Other articles in the special issue also include a bottom-up look at the relationship between language and corporate culture by Prof. Sameer Srivastava and Amir Goldberg of Stanford; a piece by adj. profs Nora Silver and Paul Jansen on multisector careers; and an article by Center for Responsible Business Exec. Director Robert Strand and Dara O’Rourke, an associate environmental science professor, on the tensions Patagonia has faced in pursuing sustainability and quality products that may have environmental impacts.
While Americans’ approval of their Congressional representatives are near record lows, new research shows that politicians aren’t necessarily a bunch of good-for- nothings—at least in Sweden.
Prof. Ernesto Dal Bó and four colleagues analyzed a rich trove of public data and found that Swedish voters consistently elect officials who are, on average, significantly smarter and better leaders than the populations they represent.
“We found evidence that there are plenty of great people available in politics,” said Dal Bó, the Phillips Girgich Professor of Business at Berkeley-Haas. “Moreover, among those candidates who happen to be available, it’s the relatively better ones who make it to the higher echelons of the political structure.”
His paper, “Who Becomes a Politician?” focused on the patterns of how municipal politicians and national legislators were chosen in Sweden over a 30-year period. It was co-authored with Berkeley-Haas Assoc. Professor Frederico Finan; Prof. Torsten Persson and Assoc. Prof. Johanna Rickne of Stockholm University; and Uppsala University researcher Olle Folke. The paper was published by the Oxford University Press in the November 2017 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Existing economic research argues that higher-income, smarter people have far more to lose financially when they run for public office, so it’s the less qualified who end up serving. In addition, an old criticism of democracy is that extending the vote to everyone—including those who are less qualified—may result in the election of low quality leaders. Dal Bó and his team took those arguments to task, questioning whether candidates can be both representative of their constituents and highly qualified to serve them.
Building a database
The authors chose to Sweden as a research test bed for several reasons.
First, as an advanced democracy with proportional-representation elections, Sweden has remained stable and fully democratic since 1917. If democracy cannot select leaders who are both representative and competent under such favorable circumstances, then critics of democracy must be right, Dal Bo argued.
Second, the country offered something they couldn’t find elsewhere: a public set of administrative data on males conscripted into the Swedish military between 1951 to 1980. The data included mandatory IQ and leadership tests the military gave between those dates.
The military used two scores during enlistment: a general intelligence test which included problem solving, numerical, verbal, spatial, and technology comprehension; and a leadership test that assessed teachable skills and measures social maturity, psychological energy, intensity, and emotional stability.
The researchers matched that test data with the names of elected members of national parliament and municipal politicians—a total of 50,000 elected candidates who ran for national of municipal office between 1982 and 2010. They also tapped data the Swedish government keeps on all residents over age 16, including age, sex, education level, and occupation, as well as earnings data from the Swedish tax authority.
All combined, they built a complete database of elected officials, test scores, income levels, and family backgrounds.
“Given this information we can precisely characterize how the personal traits of politicians relate to those in the entire population,” the authors wrote.
The researchers reached several conclusions. First, they found that not only do Swedish politicians have higher average IQs and stronger leadership qualities than those they serve, but they are also representative of the electorate: Swedish politics attract competent people beyond the scions of elite families, Dal Bó said.
While ability rises with socioeconomic status, on average, politicians remain highly able when recruited from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
They also found that elected politicians from all socioeconomic levels showed higher cognitive, leadership, and earnings capacity scores than those who simply ran for office.
“In fact, relative to their own social class, politicians from lower social backgrounds are even more strongly selected than politicians from higher social backgrounds,” Dal Bó said.
Mayors versus CEOs
The research even examined competence traits among elected officials and their siblings, and found that among pairs of siblings, “it is the one with the better IQ score, leadership qualities, and earnings capacity who enters politics,” Dal Bó said.
Other surprising findings include:
Mayors have exactly the same IQ score as CEOs of medium-size companies (firms of up to 250 employees)—despite earning vastly lower incomes.
Elected representatives overall have cognitive and leadership scores similar to CEOs of companies with 10 to 25 employees.
Parliamentary legislators had leadership and IQ scores higher than those of CEOs of medium sized companies.
While the results cannot be directly applied to other countries, Sweden could be used as a reference point if data became available from other countries, Dal Bó said. “We have to be careful with country comparisons, but we can now begin to doubt that the only people who run for public office are those who are less intelligent and have less to lose, or that voters may inevitably elect poor leaders.”
“Good leaders are certainly not inevitable under democracy,” he concluded. “But now we know for certain that democracy at least has the capability to select representative and competent politicians.”
The publication ranked 100 schools in its annual global ranking of full-time MBA programs.
The ranking is based on four major categories: new career opportunities (35% weighting), personal development and educational experience (35%), increasing salary (20%), and the potential to network (10%). Schools were surveyed for quantitative data, and MBA students and recent graduates were sent surveys asking qualitative questions about their program.
In the ranking’s sub-categories, Haas was ranked #1 for student diversity.
The Economist‘s “Which MBA?” is one of many rankings of full-time MBA programs by the media. The Full-time Berkeley MBA Program was also ranked #7 this year by U.S. News & World Report.
With freedom of expression being challenged around the world—and in clashes on the UC Berkeley campus—is there more that the technology industry can do to protect free speech and other human rights?
The answer to that question was a resounding “yes,” as the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and Microsoft President Brad Smith spoke last Thursday at a Berkeley-Haas Dean’s Speaker Series. The panel was co-sponsored by the Berkeley-Haas Center for Responsible Business’ Peterson Speaker Series, as well as the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law.
The panelists agreed that technology allows for better tracking of abuses around the world, while also enabling better communication with political dissenters—and that technology companies themselves have an important role to play.
Microsoft President Brad Smith
Smith reiterated Microsoft’s pledge to help the Human Rights Commission strengthen its work by embarking on a five-year, $5 million partnership. “We are a company that believes that a better-funded, more diversely financed UN Human Rights Commission will do more to protect people—not just their right to speak but even their ability to stay alive,” he said.
More diverse funding, Smith said, would serve to insulate the UN commission from threats by governments to reduce their contributions when the UN’s contribution is contrary to their own. “Governments want the High Commissioner to be vocal when he is poking other governments, but are less enthusiastic when he is poking them,” said Smith, in an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on the UN.
Free speech threat on rise
Haas Dean Rich Lyons framed the discussion—which was moderated by Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law—by noting that some 75 percent of governments around the world restrict freedom of expression, according to Amnesty International. Threats to a free press are also on the rise, he said.
“You may be tempted to think this is a ‘them-not-us’ situation, but the US ranks number 43 on the World Press Freedom Index, ranking just below the West African country Burkina Faso,” he said. The US had a higher ranking last year and “statements such as labeling the press as counter to American interests will probably weaken our standing further.”
Although Americans overwhelmingly support the right to free speech, that doesn’t translate into support for hate speech, he said. “Recent events at Charlottesville have brought hate speech to the forefront of our nation’s conscience and reignited calls for censorship.”
UN High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein
Balancing two conflicting priorities “requires fine-tuned thinking,” said Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the sixth UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the first Muslim to hold the position. “With internet freedom on the decline we must wage a bare-knuckles fight for rights. We have to become human-rights brawlers.”
“We need transparency”
The high commissioner said Microsoft’s technology has improved the commission’s ability to communicate with dissenters it could not normally reach, and to sift through data on alleged ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. It now has the ability to analyze video images for evidence and is developing a dashboard to give commission staffers a real-time snapshot of human rights around the world.
While calling on technology companies to do more to further human rights, the high commissioner warned that companies like Facebook may not be adhering to standards developed by the UN.
“We need transparency. We need to know what criteria they are using. If they are going to police these issues, they have to police and judge according to international standards,” he said.
Indeed, Facebook has been criticized for Russia’s use of the social media platform to buy political ads and use fake accounts to target users with messages designed to inflame religious and racial tensions. The company recently agreed to turn over to Congressional investigators more than 3,000 ads paid for by entities linked to Russia.
Universities, too, have a role in protecting free speech. But education is only part of the answer, the high commissioner said. Noting that many of the top Nazi Party members were highly educated, the high commissioner stressed that what the world needs most is educated people with empathy and compassion.
He referenced Charlie Chaplin’s character in The Great Dictator, who said: “More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.”
Watch the full video:
Top photo (L-R) Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Microsoft President Brad Smith. All photos: Manali Sibthorpe
Ellen Pao spoke on diversity & inclusion in tech and beyond. Photo credit: Genevieve Shiffrar
While serving as interim CEO at Reddit, Ellen Pao tried a new system for salary negotiations: Everyone was assigned to a band based on their experience and skills, and they were then offered compensation at the top of their bands—a strategy aimed at leveling the playing field for women and minorities.
“It was very time-consuming…but you felt better when you gave an offer. And we would cut out one or two weeks of awkwardness [in negotiations],” said Pao, who also banned revenge porn posts and unauthorized nude photos while at Reddit.
On a mission
Pao has been on a mission to fight discrimination since she rocked the tech world with her 2012 gender bias suit against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. She spoke about diversity and inclusion at Haas last week in an event co-hosted by The Berkeley Forum and Asian-Americans@Haas—a new MBA-student affinity group.
Pao now serves as chief diversity and inclusion officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, and last month released “Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change,” a chronicle of her journey through her unsuccessful lawsuit and ongoing attempt to change how the tech and business worlds view women, ethnicity, race, and culture.
Co-hosted by MBA & undergrad student groups
MBA students Carolyn Chuong and Nolan Chao, both MBA 18, said they felt lucky to host Pao for their group’s inaugural event. They had a classmate who recently interned at Kapor Capital, and they made a successful call to her publicist. Pao had also gotten an invitation from The Berkeley Forum, an undergraduate group that brings speakers to campus, so they decided to work together.
MBA students Carolyn Chuong and Nolan Chao of Asian-Americans@Haas introduced Pao. Photo credit: Genevieve Shiffrar
During her talk, moderated by Berkeley sophomore Shaina Zuber for The Berkeley Forum, Pao talked about the crucial importance of workplace relationships in career-building. Though she was serving as a junior partner while at Kleiner Perkins, she said she found herself being excluded from emails, decision-making and executive dinners.
“I didn’t realize until much, much later that … those dinners with partners were different than dinners with peers,” she said. “Throughout my career, there would be little things I noticed but brushed off.”
After a moderated conversation, Pao took questions from students. Photo credit: Genevieve Shiffrar
Working to get women included
During seven years at Kleiner Perkins, Pao said she observed signs of gender inequality in the form of all-male dinners or periods when all the men got promoted. None of the women, who seemed to have more education and work experience, received promotions, she said.
Despite evidence showing that the women’s investments were doing better than the men’s, for example, women were not being rewarded the same way, she said.
“That was a signal to me that something was wrong,” Pao added.
Pao remembered her time during the Kleiner Perkins lawsuit as a very lonely one. Her colleagues at the firm were afraid to talk to her and avoided her at the workplace. But people reached out through emails outside of work, sharing their own experiences of gender discrimination.
Last year, Pao co-founded consulting nonprofit Project Include to help technology companies implement diversity and inclusion strategies.
“Everyone has a voice. There is a systemic problem where people are not being included. And we need to change the whole system so everybody gets included fairly,” Pao said.
Photo credit: Genevieve Shiffrar
Asian-Americans@Haas
Chuong and Chao formed Asian-Americans@Haas with several other classmates last spring to bring attention to the Asian-American perspective in a business world still mostly led by white males in top positions. They plan to host workshops, social events, and speakers, and are also connecting with undergraduates, Chuong said.
“There are a lot of stereotypes that plague Asians in the workplace,” Chuong said. “Nolan and I felt like there wasn’t a dedicated group to the Asian-American community at Haas, which was quite surprising. Part of it is just to do some relationship-building.”
The startup roundup series spotlights students and alumni who are starting a new business or enterprise.
Social Filter
Co-founders: Sal Parsa, MBA 18 Joel Simonoff, BS 19 Matthew Vavricek
Joel Simonoff (left) and Sal Parsa of SocialFilter.
Nearly everyone who spends much time on social media has probably posted or tweeted something they wish they hadn’t. But the Internet has a long memory, and an ill-conceived post can damage chances of landing a new job or being admitted to a prestigious university many years later.
Sal Parsa, MBA 18, who himself admits to occasional forehead-slaps over regrettable social media posts, thinks there’s a business in cleaning up the detritus of online foolishness. “We noticed how many admissions officers and hiring officials were screening the social media posts of applicants,” he says. “We were surprised that there was no smart and easy system to help clean up (those posts) and build a better personal brand.”
As Parsa thought about starting a business, he logged onto Bearfounders.com, a service to connect UC Berkeley students and alumni looking for like-minded, would-be entrepreneurs. He met Joel Simonoff, a Berkeley engineering undergraduate, who then introduced him to Matthew Vavricek, a Nebraska high school student. Simonoff and Vavricek had met while working on a startup that was designing exoskeletons for kids with cerebral palsy.
The three formed a venture called Social Filter, built around software that uses machine learning and natural language processing to analyze social media posts and flag potentially harmful content. Users are notified of suspect content and can then delete it via an online dashboard. For now, the software scans Facebook and Twitter posts, but they are looking to expand to other social media sites and add image scanning capabilities in the coming months.
The site already has about 1,700 users, including many Haas students who have given the company a good deal of helpful feedback, says Parsa, a recipient of a Haas Jack Larson scholarship. The company incorporated in August with the help of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program (BHEP) and UC Berkeley Law.
NecesitoDoc
Co-founders: Leon Rodriguez, MBA 18 Diego Rodriguez
With a father and grandfather who practiced medicine, brothers Diego and Leon Rodriguez, MBA 18, always suspected they would return to their roots.
And they have. The brothers, alongside several colleagues, have developed an online solution to bring low-cost health care to patients in the US and Mexico who have difficulty traveling to a doctor’s office.
Leon Rodriguez, MBA 18
NecesitoDoc, Spanish for “I need a doc,” uses Internet video to connect patients to a primary care doctor or nutrition physician for about $8 a consult. In Mexico, where the platform is already in operation, the company uses a business-to-business model, contracting with companies to offer the service as a benefit to employees.
The model in the US, where licensing regulations and high fees make it impractical to offer telemedicine, is consumer-focused and limited in scope when compared to the Mexico solution, Leon Rodriguez said. NecesitoDoc will connect patients—the target audience is the undocumented Spanish-speaking community—with a doctor in Mexico who will conduct a screening and steer them to a licensed provider in their area. However, they cannot order treatment or provide prescriptions.
NecesitoDoc is in conversations with different US-based companies that offer services to the Hispanic community, which will help provide the company with a local presence, Leon says.
In Mexico, NecesitoDec offers a web-based solution that works on both smartphones and personal computers. In the US, Leon said the company is working on developing a customized solution that addresses the main concerns of the US immigrant community.
NecesitoDoc was nurtured in the UC Berkeley LAUNCH program, and Leon was awarded $5,000 from the Dean’s Startup Seed Fund. He was also a Hansoo Lee fellow and received a $70,000 grant from the Mexican government, which helped launch the young company.
LikeWallet
Co-founders: Alex Zekoff, MBA 17 Clay Anthony, MBA 17 Gagan Mac, EWMBA 17 Juan Ordonez, MS 17 (Engineering)
Advertising is the lifeblood of the web, but as more and more people use ad blockers or simply tune out commercial messages, advertisers are looking for new ways to make their message heard. One tactic has been paid “influencers,” people who post or tweet rave reviews and friendly blogs touting a company’s products.
But how does an advertiser to know if its influencers are really influencing anyone? What’s the ROI?
Enter LikeWallet, a Haas startup developing an analytics tool to measure the performance and ROI of each post by an influencer. By tracking the performance of posts and tweets, the advertiser will be able to tell if that social media message resulted in a consumer making an online purchase, and how many “likes” and comments it garnered. The software will also analyze and report on the sentiments those comments reveal.
LikeWallet started life as Pinpoint, a service to provide tailored, peer-to-peer recommendations for travelers and tourists. But as the team went through the UC Berkeley Lean Launchpad class, conducting more than 150 interviews, it became clear the idea was a non-starter, says co-founder Alex Zekoff, MBA 17. “What we were offering simply wasn’t unique,” he says.
But the idea–that online recommendations from friends and people they respect motivates consumers to buy–stuck. That insight became even more clear when Zekoff’s brother created an Instagram account for his dog and was soon rewarded with more than 20,000 followers and offers from advertisers to use that account in advertising.
“Big companies hire stars, people with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers to tweet and post for them. But influencers with much smaller followings—1,000 to 100,000—can make a difference as well, and those are the people that we as cofounders believe will have a greater impact for business,” Zekoff says.
The Dean’s Startup Seed Fund helped launch LikeWallet with a grant of $5,000 and free office space, but most of the funding is coming from the founders themselves.
The Haas Undergraduate Program ranked #3 in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Business Programs 2018, released today.
Haas tied for the #3 spot with the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.
The ranking, part of the U.S. News Best Colleges report, is based solely on a peer poll of business school deans, faculty and undergraduate directors who are asked to rate business programs on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Two years of poll data are used to calculate the score.
The peer poll also asked the deans and faculty members to rate schools in several specialty areas. The Haas Undergraduate Program ranked:
Henry Chesbrough, faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, was honored with a medal from the Industrial Research Institute (IRI) this month for his standout work in innovation management.
Chesbrough, an adjunct professor who is widely recognized as the father of open innovation, accepted the medal at the IRI’s May 10 annual meeting. The IRI, which represents 200 industrial and service companies interested in effectively managing technological innovation, has awarded the medal since 1946 to top leaders in industrial research.
Chesbrough said his own research has benefited greatly from the IRI and close observation of several of its member companies that have implemented open innovation.
The open innovation concept, which Chesbrough introduced in 2003, argues that companies need to tear down the walls between their R&D organizations and outside companies and innovators. Chesbrough believes that businesses cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license R&D processes and inventions such as patents from other companies.
“As the pace of change quickens across industries, organizations are looking at open innovation not just as a tool for solving unique technology challenges, but for expanding it to include a wider variety of participants and making a significant impact on corporate business models,” Chesbrough said.
The recipient of multiple awards for his research, Chesbrough in 2015 was named to the Thinkers50 global ranking of management pioneers. The Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers, published every two years, has been described by the Financial Times and others as the “Oscars of management thinking.”
In specialty rankings, U.S. News ranked the full-time MBA program:
#2 for nonprofit
#5 for entrepreneurship
#6 for international
#7 for finance
#9 for management
Full-time MBA rankings methodology
The full-time MBA rankings are based on data provided by participating US schools and on polls of business school deans and directors of accredited MBA programs, as well as surveys of corporate recruiters and company contacts. The score is calculated from:
U.S. News & World Report’s Best Business Schools, published March 14, is one of many rankings of full-time MBA programs by the media. Earlier this year, the Full-time Berkeley MBA Program tied for #7 among US schools in the Financial Times Global MBA ranking. The full-time program was also ranked #7 by The Economist’s Which MBA? ranking in October.
The Full-time Berkeley MBA Program tied for #7 among US schools in the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking 2017, published Jan. 30. The school tied for #13 globally.
Berkeley-Haas shared the ranking position with MIT Sloan.
In the specialty rankings, the Berkeley MBA ranked #3 globally for corporate social responsibility/ethics and #4 globally for entrepreneurship. The school also ranked #8 globally for weighted alumni salaries three years post-MBA, and #10 among MBA programs from which alumni say they would recruit graduates. Haas ranked #12 in faculty research.
Also in this ranking, the Haas School had the third-highest percentage (33%) of 2016 PhD graduates who took up faculty positions at the Top 50 business schools ranked by the Financial Times. PhD students Paolo Manoel and Dean Rich Lyons were featured in the “Red Carpet Award” article, which focused on the importance of financial support for graduate students.
The Financial Times gathers data for the annual ranking from a survey of full-time MBA alumni three years after graduation. It also collects data points from participating schools, with an emphasis on diversity, international factors, and faculty research and PhD strength.
Alumni salaries and salary increases from pre-MBA to three years after graduation account for 40% of the ranking’s weight; alumni survey responses from six other criteria account for another 19%. The publication uses the past three years of its surveys to calculate this portion of the ranking, with the most recent survey making up 50% of the total weight, and the two prior surveys carrying 25% each.
Eleven criteria, calculated from school data, make up 31% of the final ranking. These measure the diversity of the faculty, board members, and students by gender and nationality, and the international mobility and experience of the MBAs.
Faculty research accounts for the final 10% of the ranking. It is calculated based on the number of articles by full-time faculty in 45 internationally recognized academic and practitioner journals. The rank combines the number of publications from January 2014 to October 2016, with the number weighted relative to the size of each school’s faculty.
This is one of many rankings of full-time MBA programs by the media. In 2016, the school’s Full-time Berkeley MBA Program was ranked #7 among US schools by U.S. News & World Report.
The Berkeley MBA Program was ranked #10 overall in Bloomberg Businessweek‘s annual full-time MBA ranking, published on Nov. 16, 2016.
Businessweek evaluates schools across five areas: an alumni poll, a student poll, an employer poll, starting salaries of MBA graduates, and job acceptances three months after graduation.
The Full-time Berkeley MBA ranked #2 in the alumni poll, #7 in the student poll, #8 in post MBA salaries, #26 in the employer poll, and #19 in job placement.
In comparison, the program is ranked #7 among US schools in U.S. News & World Report; #7 worldwide and #5 among US schools in the Financial Times; and #7 worldwide in the Economist’s Which MBA? ranking.
The Full-time Berkeley MBA program ranked #9 in the 
Since Adj. Prof. Henry Chesbrough wrote his pioneering 2003 book, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, the concept has become a mainstay of corporate strategists and product developers around the world.
Bloomberg published its annual Businessweek Full-time MBA ranking today, ranking Berkeley Haas #11, compared to #10 last year.
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LikeWallet
The Full-time Berkeley MBA Program tied for #7 among US schools in the 
The Berkeley MBA Program was ranked #10 overall in Bloomberg Businessweek‘s annual full-time MBA ranking, published on Nov. 16, 2016.