When UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, James S. Economou and Kathryn A. Atchison, D.D.S, M.P.H., UCLA's Vice Provost, Intellectual Property and Industrial Relations decided to commisson a study of the university's current methods for fostering entrepreneurship, it's of no surprise they turned to UCLA Anderson, where fostering entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking is one of the pillars upon which the school's approach to management education is built. It's also no surprise that they asked Professor Wiliam Ouchi to do the research and write the paper, asking him to "study our current successes, what is being done elsewhere, and what we might do or change to improve upon our current way of handling discoveries and inventions."
For the last decade, Bill Ouchi, UCLA Anderson's Sanford and Betty Sigoloff Chair In Corporate Renewal, has focused his attention on public school education reform, doing research, writing papers and authoring two books, Making Schools Work and The Secret of TSL: The Revolutionary Discovery That Raises School Performance. That Ouchi would dedicate so much time to an issue traditionally outside the parameters of traditional management is not a surprise, as he if of the belief that that's what tenured faculty should do; they should turn their attentions to the important issues facing society.
The result of Ouchi's current effort is a work titled "An Ecosystem for Entrepreneurs at UCLA -- An Invitation for Campus-wide Input." In the paper, Ouchi advocates for a multi-disciplinary approach to teaching and research. He writes, "We must create new structures that bridge the gap from one culture to another, and we must embrace a culture that encourages and rewards team research. We must achieve a new understanding that our enterprise requires both curiosity-driven scholarship and problem-driven scholarship, and that each prospers only in partnership with the other."
Ouchi believes that UCLA must cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit through curiosity and problem-driven research. He cautions that entrepreneurship is not synonomous with commercialization, rather entrepreneurship is "the passionate determination to translate a vision into reality for the greater good of society -the creation of new knowledge for practial benefit. That said, Ouchi is not unaware that UCLA stands to benefit financially from its research. The university makes a substantial investment in research and rightfully expects a return on that investment. But the financial rewards must be coupled with societal benefits and the university's overall mission.
After the release of his paper, Ouchi participated in a UCLA Anderson podcast (see above). In it he says:
"UCLA has an outside sponsored research budget of about 1.2 billion dollars a year, which makes us probably the number one public university. I'd estimate that we have about 2,000 faculty inventors. We should be converting our inventions into new start-up companies and in licenses to establish companies at a much higher rate than we are now.
"With the kinds of financial stringencies that are going to face all of higher education for the foreseeable future, it's incumbent on us not to rest on the sources of revenue that we're accustomed to, but to be entrepreneurs ourselves.
"About 70% of all university patents in the United States are in health sciences and most of the remainder are from engineering and the physical sciences ... UCLA has a decided advantage in that because the key to much of health science invention is bringing together engineering to medicine and to do that you must have the engineers and the doctors cheek to jowl, next to each other and we have that. We have a first class engineering school right next to a medical school and right next door to them are the departments of chemistry, physics, biology, pharmacology and so on. So when they do an experiment together, they can all walk over a few steps, cut open the mouse together and look inside of it and see what's going on ... and that's critical."
To view the entire podcast with Bill Ouchi click here or here. Or just watch it on the blog.
To read Bill Ouchi's paper, "An Ecosystem for Entrepreneurs at UCLA, click here.
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