January 17-18, 2014
Napa, California
Second-year students in the Evening & Weekend Berkeley MBA Program worked Friday and Saturday, January 17-18, 2014 with innovation leaders from seven top companies to create co-innovation partnerships that position their firms on the cusp of what’s next in their industries.
As part of the program’s annual Mid-Program Academic Review course, 42 teams of six students each worked on projects for the innovation labs or centers of Citi, Ford, Kaiser Permanente, Nike, Panasonic, SAP, and Verizon. Rather than simply focusing on a single company, each team was challenged to find opportunities for two partners to innovate together.
The team selected by students as the audience favorite focused on assisting the elderly in maintaining independent living by combining SAP's real-time data analytics with Panasonic’s advanced display technologies.
Other teams looked at everything from how connected automobiles might be more intelligent and user friendly to new platforms for improving athletic performance.
SAP University Alliances congratulates Dean Sivara, VicePresident, Ideation at SAP for leading SAP’s support for Berkeley’s innovation event. Ella Morgulis, Berkeley MBA alum and Solution/Product Manager at SAP Labs, also supported the students during the event.
The co-innovation event was organized by Dave Rochlin of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Dave is the Executive Director, Haas @ Work Program, Institute for Business Innovation. “We had a separate ‘partner and faculty dinner’ with our Dean, Rich Lyons, during which virtually all of the company participants encouraged us to continue to help them make connections between their innovation peers at other organizations, as well as with the faculty and students at Haas. As a result, we're exploring the formation of a permanent industry "roundtable" or council at Berkeley for Applied Innovation and Design, to facilitate this further. We'd obviously like SAP to help us shape this as a founding member,” Dave said.
See more on the University Alliances Facebook page and at UC Berkeley's page.