Are you aware UT Austin has launched a new publication called KNOWon the university home page? Last week KNOW posted this captivating new video featuring recent McCombs alum John Kidenda, BBA ‘09, and a team of business, engineering and biochemistry students who have proposed a social enterprise solution to malnutrition in the developing world. It got me thinking about the increasing interest in social enterprise among our students.
John’s team is called Nutty Solutions, and their business model uses the proceeds from the sale of gourmet, organic peanut butter to fund the production of RUTF (ready-to-use therapeutic food) for Africa and other developing economies. Their entry made it to the semi-finals in the Dell Social Innovation Competition.
Nutty Solutions was recently contacted by a global charitable organization interested in implementing their model, and John is in D.C. this week meeting with them. Of social enterprise, he says, “My long-term goal has always been to be an entrepreneur, and when I discovered social entrepreneurship it was a natural fit for me. It’s a new area and people are trying to figure it out, and I would love to be part of that.”
John attended McCombs with support from the RSC Foundation which strives to create opportunities for students from Africa to attend UT Austin. Their philosophy is to “pay it forward,” and John Kidenda is clearly on that path.
The talk took place on World Cancer Day and Ulman explained that cancer will soon become the number one cause of death around the world. He also stressed that more than 60 percent of new cancer diagnoses are taking place in developing countries, which is a change from the idea that cancer was a disease of the developed world only.
“For me as someone who was diagnosed at 19 with cancer…it’s a day to not only be proud of my own survivorship but also a day to really reflect back and think about what else can we do so that people who are diagnosed in the future have the chance as I have had to live a fruitful, healthy life post-cancer.”
When asked how Livestrong was different than other cancer organizations, Ulman said, “I think in the nonprofit sector most organizations tend to be very conservative and they tend to look for incremental impact. So a social services organization might say ‘next year we’re going to help 20 more people.’ We actually are trying to do things that are going to change the game. I think that’s why we’ve attracted a lot of younger philanthropists to get involved, because it’s not just about writing a check. It’s not just about volunteering. It’s about really engaging in the issue and figuring out how in your daily life you can be a part of the solution.” Read More…
Last week 13 teams from the University of Texas at Austin competed in the annual Texas Moot Corp® Competition Semifinals. The Competition has become an annual launch for aspiring entrepreneurs who are graduate students at UT Austin.
The top five teams now move on to the Finals on Feb. 17.The winning team wins a free year in the Austin Technology Incubator, a spot in the prestigious Global Moot Corp Competition plus a wealth of industry and venture capital contacts.
The Competition simulates the real-world process of raising venture capital. The judges function as an investment group seeking to reach consensus on the venture they would most likely fund. The quality of the idea, the strength of the team and the clarity and persuasiveness of the written plan and oral presentation all influence the judges’ decisions.
The five competing teams describe themselves as follows:
The New York Times reported on new research out of McCombs that suggests a person’s political affiliation may affect their investment behavior.
The research was published by Alok Kumar, assistant professor of finance at McCombs, Yosef Bonaparte, an economics professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, and Jeremy Page, a McCombs doctoral student.
The research suggests that when an investor’s favored political party is in office, he or she is more likely to make riskier investments, shift from foreign to domestic companies and trade less often.
The study also found that the uptick in trading that happens when a person’s political party is out of power results in lower portfolio performance. In fact, investors whose party was in power performed about 2.7 percent better a year than their counterparts.
Gary Hoover, entrepreneur-in-residence at McCombs’ Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship, pinpoints eight keys to building a successful enterprise based on his 35+ year career experience, including three Fortune 500 companies and four of his own start-ups (Bookstop and Hoover’s Online were his).
Key #4 is Communicating with Clarity of Vision Can any third-grader understand your vision, or are you trapped in double-speak, alphabet soup and jargon? If not, then you run the risk of confusing people or making them feel stupid.
Hoover says executives from many Fortune 500 companies use jargon that people don’t understand, including the executives themselves. It’s no wonder they don’t have a clue what to do.
The whole idea of leadership is to bring people together. You do that by making sure people understand what you are saying. Hoover’s rule, when you have a new business idea, is to make sure your grandmother or any reasonably bright sixth-grader can understand it. He’s never seen a venture capitalist that was insulted by the fact they could understand what you were talking about.
On Feb. 24, Hoover will present his third lecture in his series “The Story of Enterprise: Lessons from Detroit.” The event is at the AT&T Center, reception at 5:30 p.m., and talk at 6:15 p.m. It’s free and open to the public.
Team members (left-to-right): Josh Stillman, David McParland, Franklin Fuchs, Nancy Palma and Jordan Hobfoll
More good news reported on the McCombs energy blog today:
A team of Texas MBA students placed 2nd in the national Renewable Energy Case Competition, held at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business over the weekend. The competition was among 12 top business schools across the country, including: McCombs, Booth, Harvard, Duke Fuqua, UNC, Tuck, Columbia, Cornell, Michigan Ross, Berkley, UCLA and Kellogg.
UCLA took first place and Columbia finished third.
The case, which focused on cultivating recommendations for a renewable energy project, concerned the development of a wind or solar project with a storage component in California. Besides big bragging rights for coming in second within such a worthy field of competitors, the team also won a $1,000 prize.
Congratulations to Franklin Fuchs, Jordan Hobfoll, David McParland, Nancy Palma and Josh Stillman for their success!
There’s an up-tick in recruiter visits for this spring’s Career Expo, a bit of relief for a certain business school dean who lays awake at night worrying about students getting jobs. Here’s what I know:
84 companies have registered for Career Expo this Wednesday, February 3, 2010 (compared to 74 last spring), and more will be added this week according to BBA Career Services Director Velma Arney.
The expo is only for McCombs students this year, opening the door for BBA, MPA, and for the first time, MBA students (full time and working professional/executive), to get full attention from recruiters.
Friday, February 5, 2010 is the Global Job Fair, an event for BBA, MBA and MPA students to network with globally focused companies.
The article, which says that “few places are as closely associated with entrepreneurial capitalism as Austin,” cites Butler’s entrepreneurial students as examples.
One of his former students is selling genetically altered glow-in-the-dark goldfish. Another is developing a diaper with built-in baby wipes. For John Butler, a professor of entrepreneurship and management at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, such occurrences are part of daily life in a town bursting with startups.
“We’re in the business of wealth creation,” Butler says.
Entrepreneurship at McCombs Moot Corp Competition The Super Bowl of world business plan competitions. 2010 semifinals are Feb. 3.
IC² UT’s interdisciplinary research unit that centers on the theory and practice of entrepreneurial wealth creation.
Austin Technology Incubator A nonprofit that harnesses resources providing strategic counsel, operational guidance and infrastructure support to assist its member companies in the transition from early stage ventures to successful technology businesses. ATI has worked with more than 150 teams of entrepreneurs, who collectively have raised more than $725 million dollars in investor capital.
Toyota Motor Corp. has announced a recall of eight models to fix a sticking pedal problem, which has affected hundreds of thousands of the company’s constomers. Sridhar Seshadri (right), a professor in the McCombs School’s Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management, along with Ananth Iyer and Roy Vasher recently published, “Toyota’s Supply Chain Management: A Strategic Approach to Toyota’s Renowned System.”
Below, the authors discuss the current troubles at Toyota.
Toyota, the most venerable manufacturing corporation in the world, appears to have stumbled. Is this a simple misstep or is this a systematic failure? It is clear that Toyota thinks the problem is serious, judging by its decision to halt production and issue recalls across the board of RAV4, Corolla, Matrix, Avalon, Camry, Highlander, Tundra and Sequoia. They also claim to have identified the cause of the problem. Public reports identify a supplier in Indiana of brake pedals as the source for the defective parts.
In our book on Toyota, we identified five principles that drive supply chain design at Toyota: the choice of volume, variety, variability, velocity and the use of learning, or V4L for short. In addition, we devote a chapter that outlines Toyota’s crisis management process.
One wonders which of the V4L factors that have changed recently — the sudden growth and swings in volume, rapid increase in variety offered beyond the vanilla Camry and Corolla, demand swings accompanied with significant pressures to stay profitable or the expansion of the workforce without a 100 percent adoption of the Toyota culture — have resulted in stress on the supply chain. Read More…
January 29th, 2010 · Just For Fun · Posted by Tracy Mueller
Apple unveiled it’s new iPad tablet yesterday, calling it “magical and revolutionary.” While some think it will see success as a souped-up e-reader and help boost newspapers and magazines, others are complaining about the inability to multitask, no camera and a questionable name.
What do you think: Does the reality match the hype?
Are you aware UT Austin has launched a new publication called KNOW on the university home page? Last week KNOW posted this captivating new video featuring recent McCombs alum John Kidenda, BBA ‘09, and a team of business, engineering and biochemistry students who have proposed a social enterprise solution to malnutrition in the developing world. It got me thinking about the increasing interest in social enterprise among our students.
