SEMESTER: Fall 19
COURSE NUMBER: 295T.1
This course is open to Full Time MBAs, Executive MBAs and Global Network for Advanced Management students
COURSE TITLE: Bay Area Innovation and Entrepreneurship
UNITS OF CREDIT: 2 units
INSTRUCTORS: Sara Beckman and David Charron
EMAIL ADDRESSES: beckman@berkeley.edu, david.charron@berkeley.edu
MEETING DAY/TIME: October 14 through 18 (Monday through Friday), 9AM to 5PM. There will also be a mandatory opening reception on Sunday evening at 6PM, October 13, at Haas.
PREREQUISITES: Open only to EWMBA Class of 2020, FTMBA Class of 2020, and EMBA Class of 2019
CAREER FIELD: This class aims to deepen understanding of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley from both the entrepreneur’s and investor’s perspectives. It is a particularly good fit for anyone wishing to be an entrepreneur or investor, but it is also valuable for anyone who might like to acquire some of the mindsets and skillsets of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors.
CLASS FORMAT: Activities, case discussions, company visits, lectures, and guest speakers
REQUIRED READINGS: Readings will be assigned electronically through our learning management system known as bcourses. The required readings before class will be extensive. There is no textbook but we will make several recommendations for related books.
BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE:
20% Engagement with classmates in online discussions of readings
30% Attendance and participation in class
25% Development and delivery of new product pitch
25% Development and delivery of investment decision
ABSTRACT OF COURSE CONTENT:
This course is available to Berkeley-Haas MBA students, along with students from the Global Network for Advanced Management program.
This course is a full immersion into the Silicon Valley Innovation Ecosystem bringing together the determination and professionalism of its entrepreneurs and the sophistication of its investors. The content will cover both sides of what makes that ecosystem work, entrepreneurship and investing, providing the perspective of the mutualism that exists here.
We will also move through the innovation and entrepreneurial cycle to provide experiences of what the activities of entrepreneurs are like here in Silicon Valley. We will help you understand how you fit in the mindset of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Participants will experience the community through one or two company visits that represent leading-edge technologies and business models as well as through panel discussions with entrepreneurs and investors.
There will be considerable teamwork required and full participation will be critical for this. Participants will work in teams to quickly produce two deliverables that apply class learning. First, they will develop and pitch a new idea. The pitches will be used on the final day to illustrate the nature of the commitment an entrepreneur makes at the start of a new company. Second, they will make an investment selection and create a term sheet that would be presented to the company. That investment decision will also be presented on the final day. These two experiences will cement the overall learning from the content, the visits, and the speakers.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES:
SARA BECKMAN has spent her years as a boundary spanner at UC Berkeley where she has held faculty appointments in both the Haas School of Business and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She served as Chief Learning Officer for the newly formed Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation and facilitated the creation of a multi-disciplinary Certificate in Design Innovation. She teaches courses such as Collaborative Innovation which integrates Art Practice, Theater and Dance Performance Studies and Business perspectives on both collaboration and innovation.
Sara’s research focuses on the pedagogy of teaching design and on the role of diversity on design and innovation teams for which she developed a Teaming with Diversity curriculum that is being used in classes in engineering, biological sciences, humanities and business courses at UC Berkeley as well as at a local high school. She has published case studies on design for sustainability, design roadmapping, and leveraging design approaches in sales processes.
Sara directs the Product Management Program for the Berkeley Center for Executive Education, serving over 350 product managers from around the world each year and works with a wide variety of companies teaching and helping them implement design and innovation practices. In her time at UC Berkeley, she has received three Distinguished Teaching Awards at Haas, the campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2018 the Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award for Senior Faculty.
Before joining UC Berkeley, Sara worked in the Operations Management Services group at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and ran the Change Management Team at Hewlett-Packard. Sara received BS, MS and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management and an MS in Statistics from Stanford University.
DAVID CHARRON has been a member of the professional faculty at UC Berkeley since 2003. He teaches courses in innovation and entrepreneurship including Business Model Innovation and Entrepreneurial Strategy, Growth Hacking for Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Applied Innovation/Design Thinking, and Venture Capital Investing.
Dave actively works with scientists through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health's I-Corps programs where he is Lead Faculty and trains others to teach its rigorous curriculum through the Lean Launchpad Educators program and also directly for the government. He also works as an innovation instructor and consultant to the Defense and National Security Technology Accelerator where he works to change the mindsets of large governmental organizations to enable rapid innovation and culture change. He is also Faculty Director for the California Healthcare Foundation’s Leadership training program.
Mr. Charron has held several leadership positions at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business School, including Executive Director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program (formerly known as the Lester Center) and Executive Director of the Berkeley Innovative Leadership Development Initiative (BILD). He was Executive Director of the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Lab, an incubator/accelerator, that produced three venture-backed startups per year (including Revolution Foods, CommandCad, TubeMogul, Indiegogo, Aurora Biofuels, Silicon Clocks, Alphabet Energy and others).
Mr. Charron is an entrepreneur, having been a founder of Scientific Learning Corporation, the first successful neuroplasticity company. He has also started several other ventures and advises startups, inventors, entrepreneurs, and companies. He is an angel investor in several companies (World of Good, sold to eBay; Yardbarker, sold to Fox Sports; Magoosh; donut.io, Neurotrainer, Cadence Health and others) and is on several Boards of Directors (Impact Carbon, a non-profit improving health, reducing poverty, and improving local environments while slowing climate change; Think-now, focused on disorders of human attention).
He has worked in and studied the field of technology commercialization and entrepreneurship for over 30 years. Mr. Charron’s experience in this field has been at corporations such as Xerox PARC, academic institutions including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCSF, and the national labs such as LBNL, LLNL, and Sandia.
Dave holds a B.S. degree from Stanford University and an MBA from UC Berkeley.