UCLA Anderson School of Management Blog

UCLA Launches Anderson Venture Accelerator: The Next Big Idea in Big Ideas

Enjoy photos of the Anderson Venture Accelerator launch

#AndersonAccelerator

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By Andy Tillman

Imagine crossing the bridge of time and bringing together Henry Ford’s efficiency, Thomas Edison’s brilliance, Benjamin Franklin’s practicality and Steve Jobs’ imagination into one room, putting all of the necessary accoutrements within arm’s reach … Oh, what might have been.

The launch of UCLA’s Anderson Venture Accelerator doesn’t get us any closer to time travel — yet — but it does, most profoundly, make it a place where future Franklins, Jobses, Fords and Edisons can think and talk and grow ideas that just might change the world.

The Anderson Venture Accelerator is a 10,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility designed in association with the UCLA Library, for collaboration among aspiring Anderson entrepreneurs, students in the undergraduate minor in entrepreneurship and campus researchers, with mentoring from alumni, entrepreneurs and the business community. Part living room, part laboratory, part conference center, the accelerator is a center where the various disciplines that make up the UCLA community can come together to bring new ideas and opportunities to life.

The accelerator’s launch was celebrated on UCLA Anderson’s Alumni Plaza, where an impressive roster of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, faculty, students and alumni gathered for an official opening. Dean Judy Olian led the inauguration, referring to the accelerator as a “living lab offering students and researchers an environment that triggers innovation and breakthrough ventures. It brings together students and faculty from across UCLA, including health and computer sciences, engineering and humanities, to develop new ventures, share success, think fearlessly and drive change.”

UCLA HBA Healthcare Conference Tackles Debate around Pharmaceutical Pricing

By Sicong Li (’17)

The Second annual UCLA HBA Healthcare Conference officially kicks off on Saturday, January 30, with the theme Innovation at a Crossroads. Be sure to ink this event into your date books, because you’ll want to hear what happens at the conference.

Why? Consider this: Last August, Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired a drug called Daraprim and quickly raised the drug’s price from $13.50 per tablet to an appallingly hard-to-swallow $750 per tablet. Daraprim is a 62-year-old drug long considered the standard of care for life-threatening parasitic infection. More alarmingly, this is not an isolated occurrence, huge price increases are being seen across the board.

In fact, at the forefront of public discourse are health care costs and pharmaceutical pricing, like the Daraprim example and a recent subpoena of Valeant pharmaceuticals in response to steep price hikes for two of its heart drugs. The health care conference will provide a morning panel on these topics featuring Matt Nye, vice president of pharmacy service at Blue Shield, and Chad Pettit, value and access director at Amgen. Attendees can most likely expect an impassioned discussion.

UCLA Anderson Launches Campuswide Venture Accelerator, Cadillac Rewards UCLA Entrepreneurs

#AndersonAccelerator

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Today UCLA Anderson is launching the new Anderson Venture Accelerator, a state-of-the-art facility that encourages students, faculty and alumni to develop new business concepts together. Anderson, in association with the UCLA Library, designed the accelerator for multidisciplinary collaboration among aspiring Anderson entrepreneurs, students in the undergraduate minor in entrepreneurship and campus researchers, with mentoring from alumni, entrepreneurs and the business community.

“UCLA Anderson is delighted to see the realization of this exciting living lab to further enhance the UCLA entrepreneurial ecosystem,” says UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian. “The UCLA Anderson Venture Accelerator offers students and researchers an environment that triggers innovation and breakthrough ventures. It brings together students and faculty from across UCLA, including the health and computer sciences, engineering and the humanities to develop new ventures.”

UCLA Anderson Venture Accelerator Is the Product of a Rich History of Entrepreneurialism

#AndersonAccelerator

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By Bryce Edmonds

Entrepreneurship is an essential part of the UCLA Anderson DNA. Consider:

It’s a school named for a successful entrepreneur, John E. Anderson; with a building called Entrepreneurs Hall; which houses the Harold and Pauline Price Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation; with the oldest business plan competition in the nation, the Knapp Venture Competition; a school that, now, in its world-class Rosenfeld Library, houses the state-of-the-art 10,000-square-foot Anderson Venture Accelerator — it’s gotta be in the UCLA Anderson water.

The Anderson Venture Accelerator, launching January 25, will be an integral part of UCLA’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, creating a communal space for the university’s numerous schools — professional and undergraduate — to come together and develop world-changing ideas. “It’s not common for universities in the United States to have their different schools all physically located so close together and to have such easy access for faculty, researchers and students across them all to interact,” says Elaine Hagan (’91), executive director of the Price Center. “It allows for interesting collaborations across departments to occur. And solutions to the world’s problems are often at the intersection of departments.”

With co-working space for 45 people, a presentation area with the latest audio/video capability, and access to Anderson’s research librarians as well as guest speakers, topical seminars and “demo days” for resident companies, Anderson students will have the opportunity to seek out new ideas across campus, create and grow their own opportunities and develop the skills necessary to create and expand their businesses.

“We want to be a service to the whole campus, and we’re starting right here in our own backyard,” says Al Osborne, Jr., senior associate dean and professor of global economics, management and entrepreneurship. “At UCLA, there’s over $1 billion spent on research every year, and a lot of that research increasingly involves intellectual capital that can be exploited for those inventors. The accelerator represents an opportunity to pull those silos together here at the Anderson School.”

The ideal collaboration, Hagan and Osborne agree, would involve established researchers from the sciences, or creative undergraduates teaming with business students and professionals to commercialize the kinds of technologies that save lives or advance access to crucial information.

Think Globally, Impact Locally

Marta Gazzera Ferro (’99) is the president of Starfish Impact Inc., a philanthropic consulting company founded in 2005. Starfish Impact makes a difference in the greater community by providing strategic investment consulting services to grant-making private and corporate foundations, strategic planning and development consulting services to operating nonprofits, and social impact advisory services to corporations and individuals who strive to achieve a stronger triple-bottom-line vision.

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Q: Why did you create Starfish Impact?

I started the company after decades of leveraging my business and leadership skills as a volunteer in the nonprofit sector. I realized I had a passion for the work and a results- and growth-oriented focus that could be translated into a career and generate greater impact in the community. I was also approached by multiple organizations to help them, and I realized that with a best-in-class team that includes Anderson alumnae Faye Walsh Drouillard (FEMBA ’08), Tina Gentile (’96) and Julie Lacouture (’06) — who are all graduates from different years and whom I met through business and the nonprofit community — I could create a business model that would make a more profound difference than I could as a solo volunteer.

Q: What are some examples of the impact that your company has had on the world?

I think it would be stretching it to say we have impacted the world but we have been a part of impacting the greater Los Angeles community and the country. A few highlights from 2015 include: working with Robert Egger, the founder and CEO of L.A. Kitchen and DC Central Kitchen, to scale and fund his visionary model in Southern California; creating a technology solution for Social Enterprise Alliance that supports its membership across the country; and creating an Impact Strategy for LIFT-LA that is poised to exponentially grow the number of families with children that are lifted out of poverty.

Q: What’s the greatest value of social enterprises in urban communities?

Social enterprises, especially in underserved neighborhoods, are crucial and on the rise. By applying commercial strategies and generating earned income from multiple revenue streams, and not just relying on charitable donations, organizations that would otherwise be classified as only public charities can often sustain and grow faster. The competition for charitable donations can be stressful and many nonprofits often struggle to raise funds. Burgeoning nonprofit entrepreneurs and existing nonprofit leaders and boards should definitely consider and analyze potential earned income streams as part of their business model. I recommend studying for-profit “giving” companies such as TOMS to learn from other socially conscious models. You can often make an even bigger social impact as a for-profit social enterprise.

#AndersonCES Vendor Display Showcases What’s Next in Tech

Enjoy our full gallery of photos

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By Golie Alemi and Andy Tillman

After a day full of panels and programs regarding all things tech — from the Internet of Things and wearables to connected cars, streaming video and Virtual Reality —the Easton Technology Management Center and High Tech Business Association sponsored a CES®-themed Anderson Afternoons featuring hot new products and innovations.

If some present-day obstacle — like heavy traffic or transporting your cumbersome DJ gear or detouring for a last-minute full-body scan — prevented you from attending, allow us to be your eyes into Tomorrowland. Below are just some of the exciting exhibitions that dropped jaws, raised eyebrows and drew exclamations from the hordes of future fans attending CES at UCLA Anderson:

 

Arcimoto: Not your father’s car of the future
The Arcimoto SRK vehicle was created to solve urban mobility problems by providing a solution that is lightweight, low cost, capable of parking anywhere and, with three wheels, super fun to drive. During the fireside chat, when asked about the design inspiration by Ana Hory (’03), former general manager/director of product management in tablets and phones at Belkin, Arcimoto founder and president Mark Frohnmayer said it was based quite simply on the design of a folding chair. The Arcimoto design team went through eight iterations before landing on the current SRK vehicle, which forewent a traditional steering wheel for handle bar controls instead and reduced the length by 20 inches, lightening the behicle weight by some 600 pounds. Safety was also a huge priority: the SRK comes with a roll cage, crumple zone and side intrusion buffers. It is regulated as a motorcycle and can be driven in the 50 states and some jurisdictions around the world. Some lucky individuals will be able to test-drive it during the Arcimoto countrywide tour, just visit the website and sign up to get on the test drive list.

3 Things to Know about Innovative Finance

By Kati Suominen

On January 5, I had a chance to be a panelist at a discussion titled Enhancing Opportunities in the Transatlantic Market: Best Practices for SMEs and Startups Including Innovative Finance, organized by the European-American Enterprise Council and the U.S. Commerce Department, alongside the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

TradeUp director Kimberly Benson moderated the seven-member panel of people who help make business and investments flow across the Atlantic. The tips I offered to U.S. and European entrepreneurs that look to alternative financing platforms to raise capital include:

1. Do your homework. With financing platforms proliferating, companies need to do their homework to find the right fit in terms of sector, size, size and type of raise, types of investors (e.g., angels vs. institutionals), and preferred monetization model (e.g., commission vs. subscription). Household name platforms are not necessarily the best bet: research the market for providers that are working on, and have investors for, companies like yours.
2. Consider alignment of interests. If you want the platform to be on your side, follow the money. Consider how the platform is paid. If the platform makes money on raises that succeed, it is interested in helping you raise; if it makes money on monthly subscriptions, it has an interest in filling the platform with companies like yours. You may want to work with the former set — and make sure you work with a team licensed to market your raise (act as broker-dealer) and is in compliance with U.S. financial regulations.
3. Be proactive: Advertising your raise on a platform is just the start. It gets you 5 percent of the way to your goal. Even if you have an expert platform team promoting your raise, they are not inside your business. It is your job to keep the fundraising team up to date on developing within your business and with your clients. It is also your job to market and do PR for your business and generate buzz useful for your raise. And it is your job to close an investor coming through a platform — so do perfect your pitch.

TradeUp is keen to work with European companies coming to the U.S. market and U.S. companies expanding to Europe. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the firm also has a presence in London and staff that speaks seven European languages. Contact TradeUp if you are looking to cross the Atlantic and need capital and counsel alike.

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Kati Suominen is a visiting assistant adjunct professor at UCLA Anderson and founder and CEO of TradeUp. Her post originally appeared on the TradeUp blog. Suominen will travel to Davos, Switzerland, this month to participate in the Economist’s keynote discussion on digital ecosystems, coinciding with the 2016 World Economic Forum.

MBA Student Considers the Digital Future of Health and Wellness

Photo: iStock/kentoh

By Liz Prutting (’16)

I went to CES® in Las Vegas for my AMR project primarily to attend the 2016 Digital Health Summit and health and wellness exhibit at Sands Expo. Our AMR involves a UCLA Health project being nurtured within the David Geffen School of Medicine’s accelerator that assists with business analysis and identifying market entry and exit opportunities for clinically relevant IP coming out of UCLA. We were at the summit to identify other players in the remote monitoring and wearables space, and learn more about other products and services that are reshaping health care delivery and personal wellness management. We definitely got more exposure than we even thought possible, as there were a number of exhibitors, from big players (Fitbit, Misfit) to up-and-coming companies (Qardio, Dexcom).

The big themes at the Digital Health Summit were connectivity, data and analytics, and cognitive computing. Technology is helping patients, physicians and payers unite around a common goal by sharing information and receiving financial reward. Patients are looking to save finances and live a healthier life. Walgreens has done a good job of incentivizing users to give their data back, recognizing the value creation of their activity measurements on wearables and other remote diagnostic measuring devices by offering balance reward points. Physicians ultimately want to see patient progress and adherence to their advice and direction. Keeping this in mind when developing a new digital health technology, device or service is crucial to success.

A Leisurely Commute at the Speed of Sound: We’re Closer than You Thought

“Transportation is broken, and it’s affecting the lives of people.”

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By Cheechee Lin

Bibop Gresta, COO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, solemnly condemned the state of today’s commute when he strode on stage for CES® at Anderson.

We all have to deal with bad transportation: those of us navigating Los Angeles spend many hours stuck in what was supposed to be a 20-minute drive to work that drags into hours. In some worst-case-scenarios around the world (I’m looking at you, China), people have been stuck in a bumper-to-bumper scenario for over 24 hours. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a way to solve this?

Enter Hyperloop.

Conceptualized by Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX fame, Hyperloop is a completely automated technology that promises to revolutionize continental travel. In 2013, Musk published a white paper proposing a mode of travel that could move at speeds of 1,200 km/h. (To put this into perspective, current high speed rails move at a pace of 320 km/h, and planes fly at 965 km/h.) Three years later, this concept is coming to fruition, with plans to begin construction across the globe for Hyperloop in 2016. This could in effect shorten a five- to six-hour commute from Los Angeles to San Francisco to only 35 minutes, using a path constructed along the I-5 freeway.

"The technical term for an object going faster than the speed of sound is Badass." -Bibop Gresta, COO @HyperloopTech #AndersonCES #CES2016

— Alycia Beutler (@AlyciaBeutler) January 14, 2016

How is this possible? Inside a tube supported above the ground via pylons, capsules holding around 28 passengers each will depart in small intervals. The air is sucked out from the nose of the capsule and pushed on the back, thus eliminating most resistance inside the tube. The closed-off elevation above the ground makes the system virtually resistant to most weather conditions that plague current transportation systems.

CES® Opens with Surge-ical Precision

Anderson associate professor and Uber research Keith Chen said we should expect autonomous cars to be driving a “nontrivial” number of people by the end of 2016.
Photo: @atakinteractive #AndersonCES

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by Andy Tillman

CES^® 2016 at UCLA Anderson zoomed to life with a transportation theme that featured panels of industry professionals, faculty and students who shared dazzling insights on all things Next.

UCLA Anderson’s own Keith Chen, associate professor of economics and head of economic research for Uber, was first to take the stage. Known in academe for blurring the lines between economics, psychology and biology, Chen may be best known in the wider world for his design of Uber’s now famous “surge” pricing model. 

For those who’ve been relying on a unicycle as their primary mode of transportation for the last five or so years, Uber is the alternative that turned paid transportation models on their heads, nearly driving the taxi industry out of business and in the process disrupting the entire transportation space. This is thanks in large part to Chen’s surge pricing model, which is based on the simple law of supply and demand. Surge calculates a higher fare for rides in certain geographic regions identified by a combination of mapping technologies to create spatial grids that provide a dense view of the world. This allows Uber to break the whole wide world into manageable grids so that when demand is high in a certain area, rates increase and drivers earn more per ride. Riders have the choice to wait out the “surge” in price by staying put or to accept the higher fare.