Spark Collaboration

The Business School Fund finances new experiential learning programs, increased investment in the academic-practitioner teaching model, and the recently launched Research Hub for a new era of collaboration.

Experiential Action Learning

Stanford GSB is developing a new set of experiential courses to provide immersive, hands-on learning experiences that enable students to address real-world issues in partnership with companies and organizations. This pilot program launches in academic year 2019–20 with three courses that will focus on analytics for social problem solving, innovative product management, and technology commercialization.

Academic-Practitioner Model

The Business School Fund is strengthening the ecosystem for collaborative teaching that will enhance our renowned academic-practitioner model. These courses partner tenure-line faculty and experts from industry. These partnerships cultivate a strong ethos of cooperation and benefit students by providing timely practical insights into everyday business challenges combined with world-class academic research.

Beyond Disruption: Entrepreneurial Leadership Within Existing Organizations is co-taught by Charles A. O’Reilly III, the Frank E. Buck Professor of Management, and Amy Wilkinson, a lecturer in management. With firsthand insights from creators within big corporations, the course seeks to help students understand which approaches to innovation work, which don’t, and what it takes to help organizations nimbly stay ahead of disruptive threats and avoid problems that lead to decline.

“Whether you’re in the C-suite or middle management, these skills will help you innovate and navigate inside a larger organization,” says Wilkinson. By complementing GSB scholarship with exceptional business minds, students gain timely, relevant learning experiences.

Professor Charles A. O’Reilly III and Lecturer Amy Wilkinson
Professor Charles A. O’Reilly III and Lecturer Amy Wilkinson

Research Revolution

The Business School Fund finances the newly formed GSB Research Hub to centralize shared data science and experimental resources, and support for faculty who are leading research initiatives that span multiple schools, departments, and disciplines. By providing more resources for data and behavioral science research, faculty are empowered to be leaders in the data science and translational research revolutions, and to work collaboratively on interdisciplinary initiatives.

As one example, Associate Professor Mohsen Bayati studies probabilistic and statistical models for decision making with large-scale and complex data, and applies them to healthcare problems. “Sometimes it seems that firms are just rushing to accumulate data and asking questions later,” he says. “But more information isn’t necessarily better. What matters is knowing what to look at.” Faculty like Bayati are active in cross-university collaborations. His recent work with medical faculty on cost-effective clinical pathways has been recognized as part of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.