UC Berkeley Haas: Innovation at the core

The Mid-Program Academic Retreat (MPAR) held annually by Haas for their MBA students was eye-opening in terms of the quality of presentations. A group of over 240 EWMBAs and a smattering of full-time students gathered in the picturesque Silvarado Resort in Napa. The concept was brilliant and simple. It starts with the Haas curriculum that focuses strong on BILD. This flagship curriculum gives students the necessary tools to be innovative leaders in the outside world. When I was an exec MBA student there, this program was not a focus of our curriculum but I chose it as an elective and it turned into one of the most exciting and pragmatic classes I had taken at Haas. My own journey continued beyond the MBA but I loved the opportunities to support the school.

At Napa, the students were put in teams of 5-6 to work on developing products that emphasize growth opportunities not for one but two sponsors. These sponsors were: SAP, Citi, Ford, Kaiser, Panasonic, Verizon, and Nike. Each sponsoring company had provided their vision of how they wanted to shape the world and the teams were given the freedom to explore what would be the ideal product they should launch in 2-3 years.

Problem Finding Problem Solving (PFPS) is a framework most graduates of this prestigious programs would know quite well. During the winter break, the students had already done a bulk of the work: talking to the customers of each of these companies and, in an ethnographic study kind of way, developed insights into the problems that needed solving. Then, in the early and late hours of the weekend at Napa, they got to work as a team. Formulating conceptual storylines of products, running versions through the clients representing the sponsor companies, and eventually making their 10 minute pitch. I got to work with the SAP teams. From a group of 7 high quality finalists, the winning votes eventually selected SAP-Panasonic team's visionary idea of integrating data analytics into home appliances.