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McCollum Authors Book  UAHuntsville business school accreditation renewed The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAHuntsville) College of Business Administration has received reaffirmation of its accreditation by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business - AACSB International, the premier accrediting agency and service organization for business schools. The College of Business Administration (CBA) remains the only school in North Alabama accredited by the prestigious AACSB International. Certification by the organization includes both baccalaureate and graduate degree programs in the CBA. UAHuntsville College of Business Administration Dean Jim Simpson, praised the school's faculty, staff and students for the achievement and said, "Reaffirmation of the College of Business Administration's accreditation serves as powerful evidence to the excellence of our programs, and represents the highest standard of achievement for the college. Moreover, this recognition from the international accrediting body is consistent with the business college's ranking in the top 10 percent of U.S. Business Schools by U.S. News & World Report." In addition to meeting the stringent academic criteria for accreditation (only one in four national business schools meets this organization's standards), the business school was specifically commended on the high quality of educational programs, faculty commitment to the students both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and the extensive assurance of learning assessment program that ensures continual improvement. In their report, the AACSB visit team stated, "Based on our conversations with administrators and community members we have learned that the view is the College of Business Administration is seen as having a clear trajectory for greatness." According to Dr. J. Daniel Sherman, associate dean of the College of Business, the AACSB accreditation is a five-year cycle. Sherman is responsible for AACSB documentation and the AACSB assessment requirements. Each year, he said, the CBA must submit annual report documents, strategic planning updates, detailed tables and comparative data. The visit team reviewed over 1,200 pages in documents that were prepared by the College of Business. The next on-site accreditation review visit will be in 2013-14. The UAHuntsville College of Business Administration first earned AACSB international accreditation in 1994. AACSB International is a not-for-profit organization consisting of more than 900 educational organizations and corporations. Compiled below is a comprehensive list of facts and developments that occurred during the 2003-2008 review period that contributed to the CBA's high ranking among business schools:
New lab speeds commercializing innovation Huntsville's College of Business Administration is making the process of commercializing new technology more efficient, more productive and more profitable for the university and its inventors. 
Beginning this year, the business school is taking on the responsibility of helping inventors from every part of the university (and partners in the surrounding community) determine whether their inventions have market value, and how best to move viable ideas into the marketplace.
"The business school is taking a leadership role in accelerating the commercialization process," says Dr. Jim Simpson, dean of the business school. "We are bringing together under one umbrella organization the resources and people to deal with issues of taking your intellectual property and turning it into commercial products." The new Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship Laboratory (ICE Lab) brings under one "roof" the resources of the Small Business Development Center, the Office of Technology Commercialization, the Charger New Venture Challenge, the business school's new entrepreneurship program, and student teams in entrepreneurship classes, plus mentors and resources from off campus. "We have the resources and the people to deal with issues of taking your intellectual property and turning it into a commercial product," Simpson said. "One of the key objectives is creating new businesses. We're going to create startups. And all of these projects will involve both students and faculty. We want to create both businesses and entrepreneurs. "Engineering and science can create new technologies, but we're going to create new businesses. This is a business school function now." In addition to working with inventors from across campus, the new lab is also partnering with companies and federal research centers to analyze their patent portfolios for possible untapped commercial opportunities. The business school's new center merges seamlessly with the university's new emphasis on finding profitable markets for university inventions and innovations, says Kannan Grant, executive director of both the ICE Lab and the university's Office of Technology Commercialization. 
"Historically, I think we've been rich in technology transfer but not in technology commercialization," he said. "For decades, for instance, we have transferred UAH technology to NASA and the Army. But this year the number of disclosures (notification of patentable ideas) we've received is almost double what we had last year and I think that growth is going to continue."
The university's emphasis on applied research, plus "an active business school, a high tech business incubator and an entrepreneurial student population, all of this gives us a very unique advantage." UAHuntsville owns about 40 patents for technology invented by faculty, staff and students over the past 40 years. Another dozen are in the pipeline. Five are licensed and generating revenue for the university and their inventors, although several others are the basis for new companies established within the past year. There is financial incentive for the university and the inventosr, said Grant: "We have one of the most generous royalty sharing plans in the country. "Our evaluation of new technology is a market driven one. We embark on a marketing effort for every technology that walks in the door, unless the creator is interested in starting a new business as a university spin off." That marketing effort uses several assets, including a subscription database of thousands of companies, "so we can drill down to the companies that might be interested in partnering in a specific technology." Perhaps the biggest challenge inventors face, however, is not learning whether an invention has commercial potential. It is bridging the gap between great idea and profitable product, process, service or business. 
Two or three years ago, Dr. Ron Greenwood, then UAH vice president for research, posed an interesting question to Dr. David Berkowitz: What role could UAHuntsville's research centers play in economic development?
"It was pretty obvious that while most centers were focused on appealing to a government marketplace, there was a whole side of business that could be spun out that typically went no place," said Berkowitz, chair of the CBA's Management and Marketing Department. "So the question was, ‘Is there a commercial payout to any of this technology?' "No one knew." When he looked deeper into the issue, Berkowitz found that technology commercialization was an under met need not only in the university, but also in the surrounding high tech community. "It became obvious that the university has a role to play," he said. He decided that the biggest impact on economic development would be in creating new businesses and that the best tools for creating those businesses are the creative, high-tech oriented minds at UAHuntsville and in North Alabama. Founded by Berkowitz, the university's entrepreneurship program started with an agreement to have students study potential markets for inventions from the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC). This semester more than 90 graduate and undergraduate students are studying the commercial potential of technologies developed and patented by UAH, AMRDEC, Pratt & Whitney/ Rocketdyne (PWR), Polaris Sensor Technologies, and The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, with negotiations underway with others. "I am absolutely certain this collaborative environment, with the new minds who are eager to learn and who don't know what isn't possible, will produce things beyond our wildest dreams," said PWR President James Maser. "I think this is going to provide a model for a new way to collaborate between industry and universities." "This semester, in an undergraduate class, we're going to use two Pratt & Whitney/Rocketdyne technologies," Berkowitz said. "Students went to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website and looked through the PWR portfolio, which includes patents for brands like Carrier and Otis. They came back with a couple of things they were interested in: A small gas turbine engine and an aerosol spray nozzle technology." Student teams are also looking for ways to use several other technologies, including a tiny electric motor developed by the Army. 
"New technologies can be found all over the state, including at other universities," Berkowitz said. "We welcome all of it. As long as it grows the Huntsville and Alabama economies, what do we care where it comes from?"
(The winning team in the 2008 Alabama Launchpad statewide new business competition was led by UAHuntsville alumnus Aaron Hammons, '99 B.A., with a product based on technology from UAT.) Because inventors have the option of joining with a student team to create a new venture, "this creates an opportunity (for students) that you're just not going to see at another institution, to create full-fledged companies," said Berkowitz, who thinks UAHuntsville's students are specially qualified to take advantage of that opportunity. "I think our students are uniquely trained," he said. "They have access to technology, access to mentors and access to a university structure that supports their creativity. Their classroom experience is different from what you're going to find at any other university." The program emphasis isn't just on creating new businesses: It is on creating businesses based on new ideas and new technology. "I don't want you to open another dry cleaners unless you come up with a better way of dry cleaning," Berkowitz said. Once the interdisciplinary student teams and their mentors have determined that a new or existing technology has commercial potential, the inventor has several options: 
• Create a team that includes UAHuntsville students, faculty or recent alumni and enter either the Charger New Venture Challenge or the Alabama Launchpad, then use the prize money to either start the business or prepare for seeking venture capital.
• Go on their own. Some faculty have created successful businesses or are fledging new enterprises based on their own creations. • Find an existing company to license the technology through UAHuntsville. A this point, the new venture moves outside the realm of the business school and the ICE Lab. "We're not in the business incubator business," said Simpson. "We're in the acceleration business - accelerating the commercialization process." The next step in growing the lab is identifying additional funding. Simpson is seeking funds to endow a professor in entrepreneurship. He would also like to hire ten graduate students and ten undergraduates from all around the campus to supplement the marketing studies being done by students in business school classes. There is also the possibility of growing the lab internally: "All it takes," says Berkowitz, "is one Michael Dell for everyone to be happy." LINER lab is final piece in BRAC response 
The new Laboratory for Integrated Enterprise Research (LINER) is the final piece of the UAHuntsville business school's response to a base realignment plan that will bring a four-star command and thousands of additional people to Redstone Arsenal.
"We have a responsibility to respond to the community's needs," said Dr. James Simpson, dean of the business school. "The new academic research center is the final piece in our strategic response to the needs of both the community and the Army." While the school's Center for Management and Economic Research helps organizations solve short-term, applied business problems, the new lab has a more fundamental, long-term view of the supply chain, acquisition and enterprise planning universe. "We want to bring the faculty and our students into this as a commitment and a major theme moving forward for the college," said Dr. Ron Greenwood, the laboratory's interim director. The lab's first assignment is a contract with the Army to map and create an end-to-end analytical framework for the Army Aviation and Missile Command's acquisition system, from initial concept through product design and development, internal and external suppliers, to quartermasters and units in the field. New research capabilities, new coursework and new academic programs were created to enable the business school's new "pull/push" strategy, said Simpson. "We're going to pull in students to major in programs related to BRAC," he explained. "We are reaching out beyond our traditional recruiting base. We are taking our faculty to talk to classes in community colleges. "We will pull UAH students and non-graduate students into our graduate programs relating to BRAC. We will recruit the existing, entry level work force and junior management into the graduate programs." Once these students are engaged in the new programs in acquisition and supply chain management, federal accounting and contract management, the plan is to "push" them back into the business community through involvement in research projects, co-op jobs, internships and scholarships. "We are trying to get students involved with corporations and the government as soon as they get here," Simpson said. "We want these companies and the government to start to interact with these students before they graduate." To that end, the college will require that some new research projects include student participation. Senior projects in some majors will involve working with a local company or government organization to apply the skills students learn in class or through research. "We want these students working in our applied and basic research centers, so when they graduate they have experience working on projects the Army has identified as critical," Simpson said. "This is a philosophical change for the college. We're going to pull these students into our programs, then we're going to push them back into the business community. We'd like to tie students to companies early in the process." Study aligns management and HR strategies A 199-year-old economic theory may provide the theoretical framework needed to, for the first time, effectively align strategic personnel policies with organization and management strategies, according to new research from The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "Our paper is grounded in established 'rent' theories, but it takes us to places we haven't been in explaining how human resource management can influence a firm's success," says Dr. Clint Chadwick, an associate professor of management in UAHuntsville's College of Business Administration. "This research is getting a lot of play because it has the potential to solve problems for people who heretofore haven't had good tools for solving those problems. This can tell me which kind of strategic HR system will work best within a firm or even within different parts of a firm. Nobody has done a good job of linking strategies and HR systems in a specific way. "This is relatively unexplored territory relative to other areas in business." This research by Chadwick and Adina Dabu at HEC School of Management in Paris has been published on-line and will be in the February 2009 edition of the journal "Organization Science." The abstract is available on-line at: http://orgsci.journal.informs.org. The underlying problem has been that strategic human resource management (SHRM) research has been phenomenon rather than theory driven, Chadwick said. "We need good theories so we can know what to do with the data." That and the shortage of hard data make it difficult to study cause-effect relationships between SHRM and corporate success or failure. "If you look at what most firms say about their people being their most important assets, that's mostly hot air," he said. "Everyone understands that employees are important to competitive advantage, but there's been little specific guidance for capturing that importance. We know there is smoke but we don't know what the fire is or how to start it." Chadwick and Dabu propose solving the theory problem by dipping into economics for "rent theories," the first of which was formulated by David Ricardo around 1809. (It is "rent" theory because Ricardo was studying why certain farm land was worth more rent than other land.) In economics there are three kinds of "rents." Knowing which kind of rent relates to the employees in an organization might help managers align their HR strategy to an organization's goals because different rents require different HR policies. In rapidly evolving industries, for instance, where it is important to gather and use employee knowledge to develop or improve goods and services, Chadwick said, "I can change my compensation system to reward sharing information. On the other hand, if you put in cross-discipline management teams but don't reward people for the team's productivity, you've blown it." There are challenges in applying rent theory to human resources: "HR is unique because employees have free will. We don't have to worry about keeping a piece of real estate engaged and fulfilled. That's not true with people. If you don't engage people, it's easy to screw things up." New Venture Challenge Winners  UAHuntsville is helping U.S. Army find a new strategy - for education The University of Alabama in Huntsville has been enlisted to help the U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC) modernize its logistics operations. Researchers in UAHuntsville's Center for the Management of Science and Technology (CMOST) will develop the educational strategy for a flanking maneuver around old habits, ancient procedures and a plethora of free-standing legacy systems developed independently by a variety of depots, offices and commands. The objective in this maneuver is a single modern, unified enterprise planning and management system for all of the Army’s acquisition, supply chain and logistics operations all the way from raw materials to units in the field. For the next nine months UAH researchers will gather data on which of AMC's present and future employees need additional training or education, what lessons they need so they can function efficiently within the Army's new logistics enterprise system, and where those training and education services might be provided at a reasonable cost. The project is supported by CMOST's first contract with AMC, which is moving to Redstone Arsenal from Virginia. "I think this has huge potential benefit for AMC," said Dr. J.P. Ballenger, the CMOST director. "SAP-based enterprise logistics is a whole new way of thinking, 180 degrees out of what (the Army has) done before. "We will be studying AMC's lessons learned in implementing the Army Logistics Modernization Program," Ballenger said. "We're trying to define the problem and determine which people are being trained, what they're being taught and what they need to be taught. We will try to find the best and most cost effective path the Army can take while standardizing this process across AMC and its commands." An important piece of the education strategy will be identifying existing classes, curriculum or training programs that might be "leveraged" by the Army. One of the dozen CMOST and UAHuntsville Continuing Education faculty and staff involved in the project is scouring the U.S. looking for educational resources. These might include on-site or distance learning classes at several colleges and universities, including UAHuntsville, the Army's Defense Acquisition University or the Army Logistics Management College. AMC has also asked UAHuntsville to determine the resources and requirements needed to establish an AMC Business Process Management Center of Excellence, which would serve as a training, counseling and problem-solving resource for the Army. Economic Summit at UAHuntsville  Dorla Evans explains financial instability to ASEM  Tony Robbins meets with CBA  |
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