As a manager in General Electric Co.’s Information Services business, GE’s electronic commerce unit, Peggy Yates views product life cycles in months, not years.
“You can’t take a year and a half to develop something, because it’ll be obsolete. It’ll be dead on arrival,” she said.
That reality led Yates to avoid the traditional MBA in favor of a new master of science degree offered by the University of Texas and directed by its IC2 (IC “squared”) Institute, a think tank dedicated to linking scientific innovation and commerce.
The new degree, an MS in science and technology commercialization, includes course material covered in an MBA. But its main thrust is to give graduates the analytical and practical tools to more quickly move research from laboratory to marketplace.
“I saw that the curriculum was very well-aligned with the work I was doing at present and would continue to be a good fit,” said Yates, whose title at GE’s Rockville, Md., location is six-sigma quality leader.
The 2-year-old degree program is a pet project of George Kozmetsky. The founder of Teledyne Inc. is a Texas Business Hall of Fame honoree who served as dean of UT’s business school for more than a decade and also founded IC2, internationally known for its research.
“Most large companies know they have to get a significant percentage of sales in new products and services. . . . This gets critically more and more important,” Kozmetsky said.
It’s part of a national trend toward variations on the traditional MBA, said Charles Hickman, director of projects and services for AACSB: The International Association for Management Education.
“There are a number of opportunities for schools in what I’ll describe as more focused or niched degrees,” Hickman said. They range from master’s degrees in managerial areas such as sports to technology-focused specialties such as UT’s, he said.
UT believes its spin is unique, said Barbara Fossum, who directs the MS degree program. “We’ve not found another school that has a program like it in most components. . . . There are a couple of schools that have management of technology programs.”
UT’s degree is aimed at entrepreneurs and also at managers inside large companies, government or academia who want to help shape the rapid movement of ideas to market.
The program, compressed into one calendar year, is innovative in design, as well as content. Students attend classes on alternate weekends in either Austin, Texas, or Fort Belvoir, Va. This year, UT added an international site in Lisbon, Portugal. Yates went to class in Fort Belvoir but was linked by videoconference to classmates in Austin and worked with them on team projects.
Several graduates said the long-distance teamwork was an unexpected benefit.
“This is to me an incredibly real-world environment,” said Mac McGowan, who manages relationships with peripheral suppliers for Dell Computer Corp. in Austin and is a 1997 graduate.
At Dell, he interacts with business colleagues as far away as Malaysia. The course structure “forced you to use e-mail, telephone, faxes, every other means you could to communicate the right message at the right time,” he said.
The chance to complete a master’s in one calendar year, while working, was a big draw, McGowan said. But make no mistake–it’s an intense year, he said.
“I’d say, on average, this program would take a normal person about 30 hours a week of fairly intensive study time, plus class time, plus your full-time job. So you virtually don’t sleep for a year,” he said.
Frank Morrill, an attorney with an undergraduate degree in geology and a burning interest in technology, was commuting between his San Antonio home and his Houston job but still opted to attend the weekend classes in Austin.
He’d learned about Kozmetsky’s work while serving on a San Antonio committee to boost biotechnology business. That was the draw for Morrill, whose dream is to help take a small high-technology company public someday.
“I’d recommend this to anyone who’s interested in high-technology business, and not just people my age,” said Morrill, 46, “but much younger people.”
The average age in this year’s class is mid- to late 30s. Requirements are similar to those for a MBA–good scores on graduate school admissions tests, an undergraduate degree and at least five years of work experience.
The faculty includes UT graduate business school professors, as well as practitioners such as Dennis Gilstad, special patent counsel for the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld.
Students take courses with titles such as Financing New Ventures, Legal Issues of the Commercialization Process and Managing the Technology-based Product Cycle.
Judging from graduates’ comments and the increase in enrollment to 66 this year from 26 in the first ’96 class, UT has tapped a market.
“There’s a real deficiency in the business world as to actually commercializing technology,” said Roy McBrayer, a 1996 graduate who is director of process development for Eco Waste Technologies in Austin. “There’s a significant need for people trained in that area as opposed to learning from trial by fire.
“That was the attraction for me.”
