At an early-June event to launch the new UC San Diego Institute for the Global Entrepreneur (IGE), the campus celebrated the joint program's mission: to train students to become entrepreneurs and technology leaders. The program places graduate students from the Jacobs School of Engineering and MBA students from the Rady School of Management in the same classes, including Rady's signature Lab to Market program.
At the launch event in Atkinson Hall, a blue-chip roster of speakers included Dan Kaufman, the director of Advanced Technologies and Projects at Google, and CSE alumnus (and donor) Taner Halicioglu (pictured second from right), previously at Facebook and eBay. Halicioglu (BS Computer Science '95) is currently a co-founder and partner in Seed San Diego, which invests in early-stage companies with disruptive technology -- companies that need both capital and additional business insight to achieve their next milestone.
Through the new Institute, UC San Diego’s world-class engineering and management schools are creating new ways to work together in order to ensure the talent and research innovations coming out of UC San Diego have the maximum positive impact in San Diego, in California and around the world. According to UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla, "These efforts complement the incubators we have been building across campus, each with a slightly different focus but with the same goal: creating opportunity for our students and training them to be entrepreneurs and technology leaders."
The Lab to Market program challenges students to build a business around a real technological innovation. It is the core of a four-course pilot for IGE's new Technology Management and Entrepreneurism Fellowship Program. The pilot began in Spring 2016, and the plan is to develop it into a master's degree program for engineers. The new program will work closely with the two 'accelerators' located in the Rady School: StartR, and mystartupXX. The latter program encourages diversity in entrepreneurship, and all of the 10 teams accepted into the program each year are required to include at least one woman in a senior management role. The mystartupXX accelerator is open to UC San Diego students of any major, and it played a key role in the early development of ThoughtSTEM, whose co-founder, CSE alumna Sarah Guthals (Ph.D. '14), was invited into the program.