A Look Back at 2012-13: Berekeley-Haas Defining Principles in Action

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Berkeley MBA students won the MIT EdTech Case Competition in November with strategy recommendations for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on a new online tool that helps parents to help children with schoolwork. 

Razoring their way to raising funds, students donated $12,500 to Challenge for Charity through the annual tradition of No-Shave November.

Creativity is a matter of course in Managing the New Product Development Process. For nearly 15 years, this joint Berkeley MBA/Mechanical Engineering course has guided inter-disciplinary student teams from concept generation through prototype development in a semester-long project.

Berkeley MBA students won the Michigan Renewable Energy Case Competition with a portfolio approach to helping a Michigan utility generate more electricity with renewable energy technology.

First-year full-time MBA students Elsita Meyer-Brandt and Jens Uehlecke were just two of the aspiring Haas entrepreneurs to benefit from expertise offered by the Lester Center’s Entrepreneur’s Corner.

Full-time students won the IBM/Novartis Non-communicable Disease Challenge with a pharmacy membership program in Mexico that will provide access, community, and encouragement for improving the health of pregnant women with diabetes.

Evening and weekend MBA students used tools from Problem Finding Problem Solving on their way to semi-finalist status in the global Innovation Challenge.

 

Berkeley Team Impresses with Idea to Grow Habitat for Humanity

(L. to R.) Right Matt Chwierut, Janice Yuen, Former President Bill Clinton, Salma Mousallem, Iris Shim, and Ruco Van Der Merwe.

Berkeley MBA students Iris Shim and Janice Yuen, both MBA 12, recently had the chance to make an impression upon former President Bill Clinton and Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus. Yunus, along with the CEO of Habitat for Humanity and a list of NGO executives, served as a judge in the Hult Global Case Challenge, a competition in which Berkeley claimed 2nd place in the housing track. (Clinton was on hand to watch the competition and congratulate the winners.)

Shim and Yuen teamed with three Masters students in city and regional planning: Matt Chwierut, Salma Mousallem, and Ruco Van Der Merwe to win the regional title  in this competition targeting global poverty. They took second place at the global finals in NYC on April 26  for their approach to helping Habitat for Humanity International reach  exponential growth of 10 million homes in 10 years–and address the increasing lack of adequate housing in the world.

The team’s “Build it Together” initiative would shift Habitat from builder to enabler. “We proposed leveraging Habitat’s amazing brand and sharing its model of community development, inviting other players to the table and orchestrating a network of mass customized community solutions,” says Yuen.

Thousands of students from 130 countries competed in challenge tracks that also included education and energy. Yuen says Berkeley stood out by offering a  game-changing organizational shift rather than a single technical solution for isolated regional growth. “Housing providers would be infinitely more impactful in aggregate than they are individually,” Yuen says, adding, “It was an incredible experience to present to some of the greatest movers and shakers of the social impact world.”

MBA Iris Shim and Team Acopio Win 2nd (and 3rd) Top Prizes for Big Ideas

Iris Shim, MBA 12, won a Berkeley Big Ideas Prize last year for Crop-to-Cup and proves that big ideas keep brewing: Her team, now known as Acopio, won two more prizes in Big Ideas 2012 for their plan to boost the quality and economic opportunity found in a morning cup of joe.

Shim and I-School students Ariel Chait, MIMS 12, and Paul Goodman, MIMS 12, continue to hone a mobile/web-based data aggregation and delivery tool that increases transparency, traceability, and quality assurance along the global commodity chain for coffee. Acopio won the $10K grand prize at Big Ideas’ April 13 Pitch Day and a $10K prize in the Scaling Up category, topping more than 200 competitors. Shim, Chait, and Goodman tell the Acopio story below.

Since their win last year, the team has spent summer and winter breaks in Mexico and Nicaragua conducting field research, developing a prototype, and running their first pilot; have formed a partnership with a global investment fund providing working capital financing for agricultural enterprises; and has been accepted into a Bay Area incubator. The team plans to push the Acopio (“harvest” in Spanish) social venture forward this summer and beyond. Learn more at Acopio’s website and in this I-School story on the team.

 

Haas Achieves: A Video Year-in-Review

Congratulations to the full-time MBA classes of 2012 and 2013. In just one year you have accomplished an extraordinary amount, from organizing conferences and international treks to winning case competitions. We are so proud of all you achieve at Haas–and have captured what we could (i.e. some, certainly not all!) in this Haas Achieves video. We know you have many achievements yet to come and wish you the best.

Questioning the Status Quo in Education

Third place in the ELCC: (l. to r.) Jerry Lee, Mike Ciccarone, Luke Ahn, Nikita Kiselev, all MBA 13.

Sparking school district innovation with miniature “X-Prize” competitions was but one idea put forth in Haas School’s 6^th annual Education Leadership Case Competition. This particular idea garnered third place for the Berkeley MBA team of Mike Ciccarone, Nikita Kiselev, Jerry Lee, and Luke Ahn, all MBA 13. One of the impressed judges called it “out of the box, yet entirely do-able.”

Nine student teams took on the challenge of helping SFUSD spread innovations district-wide and spur innovation in the impending absence of federal funding. The Haas team proposed holding small district-wide competitions that would target the specific learning needs of key stakeholders.

“If a teacher was struggling with developing his own tools to analyze student data to direct instruction, we imagined a contest calling on all teachers in the district for their best tools to meet this need,” says Ciccarone. “The best entries would be rewarded with public praise and education supplies for classrooms–donated by local partners.”

Ten teams from eight MBA programs competed, with UCLA Anderson placing first and Vanderbilt’s Owen School placing second. “The district representatives left with many ideas on how to spark innovation using a confined set of resources,” says Bruce Dos Santos, MBA 12, co-organizer of this year’s competition along with classmates German Freiwald and Aaron Sokol. “We think they will begin to implement some of these tools in the coming weeks and months.”

Dinner with eBay’s Chief Marketer

Richelle Parham, eBay's chief marketer for North America, addresses the CMO Insight Series

Richelle Parham could have spent last Tuesday evening with actor Brad Pitt. Instead, the chief marketing officer for eBay North America was discussing brand strategy with Berkeley MBA students over dinner and seemed delighted to be doing so.

Parham kicked off the first session in this year’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Insight Series, a Berkeley MBA course in which top marketing executives from companies including Wells Fargo, Jamba Juice, Salesforce, and Genentech will share wisdom with students in the classroom and in a more intimate setting over dinner.

Parham’s missed opportunity to rub shoulders with Pitt was during an eBay online charity auction experience brought to life in a physical and interactive gallery hosted by eBay and Make It Right, an organization Pitt founded to help rebuild New Orleans’ Lower 9^th Ward. She fit in her Haas engagement between serving as a panelist at a White House Urban Economic Forum and as keynote speaker at the Dare 2B Digital conference on tech careers for young women.

In class, Parham discussed the company’s auctions aimed at raising funds for charity, sharing examples from Buffet, Bieber, and Beatrice (Warren, Justin, and Princess). Each auctioned off something of value (lunch with, lock of hair, famous pink party hat) to raise funds—together more than $2.9 million in this case—for worthy causes.

Repositioning the World’s Largest Online Marketplace

However, eBay is now about much more than auctions, as Parham pointed out while sharing insights on repositioning “the world’s largest online marketplace.” Parham, who previously served as head of global marketing innovations and initiatives for Visa, launched the class with one of eBay’s new TV spots. “Good, you laughed!” she said at the end. “I’ll say more later about why that was important.”

Parham said that while eBay enjoys 99.9 percent to 100 percent brand recognition, the company still has legacy perceptions to battle. “A lot of people still think of eBay as the place for auctions and used merchandise, but, in fact, 90 percent of eBay items today are fixed price and more than 50 percent of our merchandise is brand new,” she said. Much of her work since joining eBay in fall 2010 has been to align consumer perceptions with eBay’s new reality.

Whimsy is part of the approach, hence Parham’s appreciation of the laughs that followed her TV spot about parental attention deficit at a child’s school play. The new campaign pokes gentle fun at everything from “mom jeans” to gossiping about celebrities during a mani/pedi and features eBay’s new messaging: When it’s on your mind it’s on eBay. Buy it new. Buy it now.

The spots also feature shoppers making purchases via mobile devices. “Mobile is where the online and offline worlds meet,” said Parham. In 2011, eBay’s mobile application was downloaded 70 million times.

Parham chats over dinner with Emma Qian, MBA 12

Over dinner, the group of five students had fewer than 70 million questions, but still quite a lot. For a relaxed two hours, they asked anything they wanted of eBay’s CMO—and in the course of the semester, each student has dinner with one speaker.

They wanted to know how Parham had charted her career, how eBay’s product organization is structured, how budgeting happens, how she achieves work/life balance, and what she looks for in hiring, to which she responded, “Know my business. Ask me questions that make me think. Don’t be afraid to break some glass.” Parham also shared thoughts on the importance of drawing youth, and girls in particular, to technology and about beloved collections (Barbie in her case, 80′s action figures for participating student Andrew Wisnewski, MBA 13).

As the evening wound down, Parham asked the group what they wanted to get out of the course and what they felt they got from her presentation. “For me this is a guide for how people who do marketing think about their customers, since I don’t have that background,” said Meredith Benedict, MBA 13. “It’s like getting all the lessons of a marketing class, but from real people.”

Winning Approaches: IBM/Novartis NCD Challenge

A winning approach: Emily Ewell, MBA/MPH 12 (r.), and other team members hit the streets in Mexico City to talk with targeted users.

The Competition: The IBM/Novartis NCD (non-communicable diseases) University Challenge.

The Team: Tara English, MBA 13, and Emily Ewell, Jenny Chang, and Rachel Sherman, all MBA/MPH 12.

The Outcome: First place in the “Developing World” category.

The Field: Sixteen teams, including those from Spain’s ESADE and the London Business School.

The Challenge: To create a tech-enabled innovation in non-communicable diseases. “This was extremely open ended as there are so many diseases, making it challenging to target a specific, actionable area where we could achieve maximum impact,” says Ewell.

The Winning Approach: A proposal for 2Vidas, a pharmacy membership program in Mexico for low- to middle-income pregnant women with diabetes that would provide access, community, and encouragement to improve health for mom and baby.

Won Because: The  team’s “2-for-1″ approach impacts the health of both mothers in the short-term and babies in the longer term. Judges also touted the proposal for its focus on a confined timeframe of behavior change—pregnancy. “This is a highly motivated population that’s easy to target, track, and measure,” Ewell observes. And the team impressed with a decision to test hypotheses first-hand in Mexico.

The H Factor:“Our team was definitely the strongest contribution to our success, which is in so many ways due to the Haas culture,” says Ewell. “This was really an ‘all for one and one for all’ effort.”

Defining Principles at Work: “We were fearless in our quest to find an innovative solution for the NCD Challenge, but we were also the first to ask for help,” says Ewell of a Confidence Without Attitude approach that led them to reach out to friends, healthcare colleagues, and mentors. “Taking a step back and listening to their perspective was not only refreshing, but enlightening.”

The Motivation: At the end of the day this isn’t for us – it’s for women with diabetes and for their children, families, and communities,” says Ewell. “All of us were motivated by the final impact of creating a sustained impact on communities in need – in a scalable, replicable way.”

2Vidas hope to launch a pilot this summer in Mexico City.

Of Resolutions and Razors: MBA Community Raises $12K for Charities

No job interviews just yet, thanks.

Razors may factor into the New Year’s resolutions of some 120 Berkeley MBA students, who sported a shaggy look following the annual tradition of No-Shave November.

This year’s event raised $12,500 for Challenge for Charity (C4C), an organization of West Coast business schools that raises funds and contributes volunteer hours to the Special Olympics and a charity of each school’s choosing. (Berkeley-Haas contributes to the Alameda Point Collaborative.)

In honor of No-Shave November, beards, heads, legs, and chests were left to their own devices, causing hardship for a few. “It was itchy,” says Ignacio Garcia-Ros, MBA 13. “My girlfriend wasn’t thrilled,” says Kevin Callaghan, MBA 13.

The event concludes with an auctioning off of each student’s “canvas” (be it legs or head, or chest) to the highest bidder–who then shaves the participant in a design of their choosing. The new look must be kept for the next 24 hours. For Mike Vincent, MBA 13, this was the challenge. Vincent already had a beard and says, “While I knew it would be hard to part ways, I also knew I had plenty of friends and family who would love to see it go.”

“We don’t do things half-way here at Haas,” says Garcia-Ros. “If we commit to something and it’s for a good cause, we’re all in!” Some participants, however, may be resolved to keep razors close at hand for the remainder of the year.

 

 

Winning Approaches: MIT EdTech Competition

The Competition: MIT EdTech Case Competition, Nov. 2011.

The Team: Full-time students Gordon Chan and Kawai Lai, both MBA 12, Mike Ciccarone and Flora Kuo, both MBA 13.

The Outcome: First place.

The Challenge: Marketing and CSR strategy recommendations for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on a new online tool that helps parents to help children with schoolwork. “The aim was to reach especially those parents who may be low income and lack access to technology,” says Chan.

The Field: Included Harvard, Stanford, and Duke.

The Winning Approach: A holistic view addressing parents and school districts as separate segments. Also, a creative presentation featuring mock-up of a parental awareness video (pictured above).

The Motivation: “There have been many broken promises in education reform, but I truly believe that technology has the potential to deliver in its promise to improve education,” says Lai of her interest in the ed tech space.

Defining Principles at Work: “We actually had other competitors tell us that our team came across as confident–yet approachable,” says Kuo.

ZZZ Factor: Six hours of sleep over two days.

Fuel of Choice: Caffeine and shrimp chips.

The Berkeley-Haas first-place winners of MIT EdTech Case Competition: Kawai Lai, MBA 12; Mike Ciccarone, MBA 13; Gordon Chan, MBA 12; and Flora Kuo, MBA 13.

Demonstrated Prowess 2011-12: Education, management of organizations, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

• First-place: MIT EdTech Competition, Babson SF Rocket Pitch Competition
• Second-place: UT Austin Real Estate Challenge, Vanderbilt Human Capital Case Competition, Babson SF Rocket Pitch
• Third-place: Carlson Elite Eight Brand Management Case Competition

Polar Vision: Next Dispatch for Bloomberg Businessweek

Enoying one final ice-free evening in Punta Arenas, Chile

After months of meeting with sponsors, planning logistics, and marketing the expedition, the Polar Vision team leaves TOMORROW for their 600-mile trek across Antarctica to the South Pole. The team aims to set records and raise awareness and funds for sight charities. In final preparation, they are slicing salami, packing eye masks to ensure sleep in the 24-hour daylight, checking the cables that charge cameras–and issuing thank-yous to those who have helped along the way. Read about it in the team’s most recent post for Bloomberg Businessweek: Dispatches from the South Pole, Entry 2: Packing Up.