Robert S. Hamada
Dean and Edward Eagle Brown Distinguished Service Professor of Finance
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FROM THE DEAN
All About E-Business and
Entrepreneurship
These days, it seems everyone is an entrepreneur. Technology has reduced the barriers and increased the rewards for start-ups. Traditional businesses are taking an entrepreneurial stance to seize vast opportunities and tap new markets online. At this and every other top business school, students are clamoring for courses and experiences that will give them a leg up in the exciting and fiercely competitive arena of technology and e-business ventures. And we are providing them.
We began putting the building blocks in place when faculty voted to establish a concentration in entrepreneurship in 1997. They did so because they realized that this is now a truly legitimate academic area (with much data and with the alliance of many of our tenured faculty), that it is a permanent and important aspect of local and global business, and that student demand for these courses will not be temporary. Curricular offerings in the areas of new ventures, technology, and e-commerce have grown to 18, and this year we are adding three more. We recently renamed the concentration “entrepreneurship and e-ventures” to reflect more accurately the breadth of knowledge it offers.
Top-notch teaching and research support this growing curriculum. Chicago GSB was the only school to have two professors in the top six--Steven N. Kaplan and James Schrager--named to Business Week’s list of the best entrepreneurship teachers in M.B.A. programs. Toby Stuart, Austan Goolsbee, Luis Garicano, Robert Gertner, and others are adding to our understanding of the new economy with research on e-commerce, technology, and their effect on business as we know it. The research of several faculty members--Garicano, Judith Chevalier, Kaplan, Dennis Carlton, Goolsbee, and Gertner--was featured at a recent conference run by the National Bureau of Economic Research e-commerce program.
Students themselves are actively involved in developing and maximizing e-business opportunities. Three student organizations--the High-Tech Group, West Coast Group, and Wine Club--worked with Career Services and Corporate Relations to organize West Quest, a four-day career networking trip to Silicon Valley. Nearly 300 students attended West Quest last December, paying their own way and giving up part of their holiday. The Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge, now in its fourth year, doubled participation this year, attracting 103 business plans; 75 percent were for Internet or technology-related ventures. The quality of the business plans was so high that even teams that didn’t place in the competition stand a good chance of securing venture funding. Flyswat, a company cofounded by Ray Krouse, ’99, and GSB student John Rodkin, was recently purchased by NBC Internet for $100 million. (See “Who’s News,” Spring 2000.) And Atif Rafiq, ’00, was the No. 1 pick among this year’s business school graduates in Industry Standard’s annual “M.B.A. Draft.” (See “Who’s News” in this issue for more on Rafiq.)
We’re fortunate to have alumni who are leaders in the tech-venture world to set an example for our students and support our efforts in this area. Among them are Jean Claude Monty, ’70, chairman, president, and CEO of telecom giant BCE (previous holding company for Nortel); George Conrades, XP-28 (’71), chairman and CEO of Akamai Technologies (see “The Thrill of the Next Big Thing”); and Jeffrey Weitzen, ’80, CEO of Gateway. Other alumni like Katherine Gould, ’78, a partner in Foundation Capital, have addressed classes, judged the New Venture Challenge, and provided plenty of real-world input so that our offerings in this area are fresh and relevant.
Today, we have the core elements in place to address e-commerce and entrepreneurship as they become increasingly powerful economic forces. These elements are by no means the end of our efforts in this area. Like every other business school, we’d like to offer more, and we will. Support for entrepreneurship and e-venture activities is a key component of our capital campaign. We are committed to raise a $15 million endowment to name and create a center to be the umbrella organization for all of these activities. An endowment and center will symbolize that the GSB considers these activities to be a permanent part of our curriculum, faculty, and research. We are confident that we will offer exciting new opportunities for students and important contributions to the field soon--and for years to come.
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