November 11, 2011 | Read Time: 3 minutes
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has announced a new fund that will award grants to ventures that grow out of university courses—part of a larger innovation effort at the prestigious business school.
The Wharton Innovation Fund was created by a $2.7-million gift by Alberto Vitale, former chief executive of Random House and a Wharton alumnus. It will award roughly $125,000 in grants each year.
“His interest is in taking advantage of the creativity of the Penn students and the Wharton students in addressing problems that are of larger scale,” says Don Huesman, managing director of the Wharton Innovation Group.
The fund will give preference to student-led ventures, but faculty and staff members will also be eligible to apply. University officials expect that grants will be relatively small, between $1,000 and $5,000 per project.
Tiers of Innovation
The question of how to become more innovative is top of mind for officials at the Wharton School. The dean has put together a four-person team—three of whom are working on the effort full time—to identify and start work on new ideas that could transform the way Wharton works.
The mandate to identify new ideas to help move the school forward is a tall order. Mr. Huesman says that he finds it helpful to think about innovation as being divided into three tiers.
At the first level, he says, are new approaches to improve current operations that can be put into place in the next six months to a year.
“Those are things everybody has to be working on all the time, because if we don’t, Stanford or Harvard will,” he says with a chuckle.
The innovation group spends roughly three-quarters of its time at the second level, Mr. Huesman says, projects that “need some germination” and are likely to take two to three years of preparation. One example at Wharton is the group’s work on continuing-education offerings for alumni, an idea that grew out of faculty discussions about the financial crisis.
The remainder of the group’s time is focused on ideas that look even further into the future, says Mr. Huesman: “Horizon three is those wild things that may be crazy ideas, one of which might be really interesting and completely reform and change what Wharton is.”
Institutions that are successful today can’t rest on their laurels, he says. Just because a business model serves an organization well today doesn’t mean that it always will. Says Mr. Huesman: “It’s very possible that in 20 years’ time, if we stayed the same, we would become irrelevant.”
Go deeper: When the Wharton School started its innovation program, the business school asked students, faculty, and staff members to submit their ideas for what the group should do. The 200 submissions were then whittled to a dozen through a process called an innovation tournament.
Watch here as Karl T. Ulrich, professor of entrepreneurship and Wharton’s vice dean of innovation, talks about his research on innovation tournaments.
