With a generous donor gift in hand, Sanjay Sharma, dean of the School of Business Administration, assembled search committees to find candidates to fill three new endowed faculty positions. Once identified, it didn't take long for him and other members of the faculty to land a troika of experts in the areas considered most critical to the future of the school: sustainability, entrepreneurship and finance.
Sharma’s first call was to longtime friend Stuart Hart, a world-renowned business sustainability expert with a focus on the implications of environment and poverty for business strategy. His best-selling book, Capitalism at the Crossroads, was selected by Cambridge University as one of the 50 top books of all-time on sustainability.
“I’ve known Stuart for a long time, so in some ways this has been 20 years in the making,” says Sharma. “He’s a superstar in his field and puts us at the forefront of business sustainability. I knew if I could convince him to come others would follow.”
And they did. Not long after Hart agreed to become the Steven Grossman Chair of Sustainable Business in the spring of 2014, Professor Charles Schnitzlein accepted an offer to become the Steven Grossman Endowed Chair in Finance. Completing the trifecta was former aerospace engineer-turned entrepreneurial academic Erik Monsen, who moved from Scotland to become the Steven Grossman Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship.
“We are very fortunate to have such distinguished people who will help raise our national profile,” says Sharma, who used the school’s new MBA in Sustainable Entrepreneurship (SEMBA) as part of his sales pitch.
The sustainability star
Hailed by Bill Clinton for creating “sustainable, socially responsible models of capitalism,” Hart has published more than 70 papers and authored or edited seven book. His 1995 article “A Natural Resource-Based View of the Firm” is the most highly-cited academic work in the field of sustainable enterprise, while his seminal piece “Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World,” won the McKinsey Award for Best Article in Harvard Business Review in 1997 and helped launch the corporate sustainability movement.
“A sustainable world is one in which humans -- indeed, all life forms -- can flourish indefinitely,” writes Hart. “This means reversing the widening gap between rich and poor, and halting the rampant loss of natural capital and biodiversity worldwide. A sustainable enterprise, then, is one that grows and profits by moving us more rapidly in this direction.”
Bloomberg Businessweek calls Hart “one of the founding fathers of the ‘base of the pyramid’ economic theory” that refers to the largest, but poorest socio-economic group consisting of the four billion people (out of seven billion worldwide) who live on less than $4 per day. He has developed new models of doing business that target that demographic to help lift them out of poverty, while also helping businesses thrive.
Hart works directly with emergent companies to develop sustainable enterprises that facilitate effective clean technology, base of the pyramid, and “green leap” initiatives through his own organizations: Enterprise for a Sustainable World (ESW); Emergent Institute; and BoP (Base of Pyramid) Global Network.
Read more about Hart in this interview with The Guardian and in this story from UVM Today.
The finance guru
With the recent retirement of two senior members of the finance faculty, the business school needed a well-established scholar who could teach the fundamentals of finance and show SEMBA students how to run a sustainable business. “We started looking for leaders in the field with expertise in behavior finance because they understand investor behavior,” says Sharma. “Chuck has published in top journals, but he’s also interested in figuring out how to fund and evaluate sustainable investments with renewable energy and other sustainable enterprises where the paybacks are much longer.”
Schnitzlein, who previously held faculty positions at the University of Central Florida, University of Arizona, and the University of Miami, studies market design issues by running controlled experiments with individuals using the tools of experimental economics. “The approach I’ve taken using experimental economics is to recruit subjects and train them in a trading mechanism, such as a type of auction,” says Schnitzlein, who lived and worked in Europe for five years prior to starting his doctoral studies. “You pay them based on their performance and then you do a controlled experiment where you can actually vary the single feature of the market you are interested in learning about.”
Another area of research interest for Schnitzlein involves measuring the confidence level of individuals bidding in common value auctions. In his paper, "On the Persistence of Overconfidence: Evidence from Multi-Unit Auctions," he and his colleagues analyzed pre and post-task confidence in an experiment in which subjects bid in multi-unit common value auctions, which is the type of auction that is used to sell Treasury securities, and has been used in some IPOs.
"It turns out that the people who were of high confidence tended to be overconfident, the people of moderate confidence were well-calibrated, and the people of low confidence actually tended to better than they thought they would," he says. "What was really interesting was that people updated their confidence based on how well they did if they were of low or moderate confidence, but if they were of high confidence they would tend to not do better than average yet continue to think that they were above average. It almost seems as if the confident are different. Interestingly, the ones of high confidence were the ones that were mostly likely to have stock trading experience. They would say it was the market or just bad luck if they didn’t do well.”
Schnitzlein has published on a wide range of financial topics incuding the effects of changing the structure of markets that have appeared in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Business and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
Schnitzlein, who will teach undergraduate courses in investment analysis and portfolio management and the SEMBA finance course, is a strong believer in the importance of students learning the core principles of finance before pursuing more entrepreneurial ventures. “My focus is on preparing them to do the finance end of a business and to understand the institutions with which they are going to have to interact,” he says. “I consider myself a finance guy who is going to work hard to build a finance faculty group here that can impart state-of-the-art finance skills. Sanjay has a real strategic vision, and I’m really excited about the direction of the business school. There’s a lot of energy and some impressive hires, and it’s something I’m very excited to be a part of.”
The entrepreneurial expert
The search committee’s task of finding someone to meet the diverse requirements of the entrepreneurship position may have been the most challenging. Equal parts teacher, researcher, technology transfer expert and partnership builder, Monsen’s resume meets all of the above.
The business professor's career has an unlikely beginning. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Monsen majored in aeronautical engineering in pursuit of his lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut. That aspiration led him to Stanford where he pursued a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics engineering -- but an internship at the German Aerospace Center changed his plans.
“Stanford found me an internship there three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it was an exciting time” he says. Offer of a permanent position followed, and Monsen stayed in Europe, where he became involved in technology commercialization as an engineer, traveling to research sites and companies. “I had so much fun doing the management side of it," he says, "I decided to go back and get an MBA.’”
Back in the states, Monsen earned an MBA in entrepreneurship and technology management and a doctorate in organizational management from the University of Colorado, while also working in a business incubator at Ball Aerospace & Technologies and running a small consulting business on the side. He later worked as a senior research fellow in the Entrepreneurship, Growth, and Public Policy Group at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena, Germany, and gained teaching experience as a senior lecturer and director of research in the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde Business School in Glasgow, Scotland.
Monsen’s current research focuses on how and why employees act or don’t act entrepreneurially, and -- a logical extension of his background -- how and why scientists and engineers choose to commercialize or not to commercialize their research. His work pushes the boundaries of existing theories regarding organizational strategy and employee decision making, has been published in Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Small Business Economics, Journal of Economic Psychology and other top journals.
Monsen plans to establish a Center for Technology Venturing Research that would help start-ups and medium-sized tech firms who want to grow by having university researchers work with them to advance goals. “If these companies open their doors to us and say ‘these are the challenges we’re facing’ and we say ‘this is what we can research for you as academics,’ we should be able to work collaboratively to come up with solutions,” says Monsen, who plans to partner with the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, the Office of Technology Commercialization and other tech transfer and academic units across campus.
Bringing students into commercialization work is also part of his plan, creating opportunties for them to act as consultants for researchers on campus who need help bringing new technologies to market. “It gives students a real-world experience," he says, "not just a hypothetical, theoretical business plan that may or may not happen.”