Four teams of Evening & Weekend MBA students were recently challenged by PayPal to improve a task people dread: pumping gas.
The project was one among many assigned by companies to EWMBA students during their required Mid-Program Academic Retreat (MPAR), an intensive weekend-long course halfway through the three-year EWMBA experience that allows students to apply their classroom learning to real world challenges.
The retreat was organized to run in parallel with the inaugural Berkeley Roundtable on Applied Innovation and Design (BRAID) conference, at the Silverado Resort in Napa, Ca., Jan. 16-18.
Combining the two events allowed company innovation executives to draw fresh ideas from business students, while the students were able to test their mettle and network. A dozen faculty members, two dozen innovation executives, 250 students, and a dozen staff members participated.
BRAID is a joint program of the Haas School of Business’ Institute for Business Innovation, and Berkeley Engineering’s Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, with additional faculty participation from the School of Information and The Blum Center for Developing Economies.
The goal is to provide executives from corporate innovation organizations with the opportunity to connect with a community of practitioners, facilitate their own professional and organizational development, and collaborate with students and faculty across Berkeley on a range of innovation projects and issues related to human-centered and design-based innovation practices.
A growing group of BRAID corporate members include PayPal, W.L. Gore, Hearst, Siemens, Kaiser, AutoDesk, Citi, Panasonic, and Ford. While some of the companies are established Bay Area innovators, others have just recently set up innovation “outposts” in Silicon Valley, a growing trend.
“There’s a lot of exciting applied innovation and design-based work happening at Berkeley and in the greater Bay Area, and growing student interest and demand for getting exposure and hands-on experience,” says Haas Lecturer and BRAID Executive Director Dave Rochlin, who founded the roundtable last fall with Haas Senior Lecturer Sara Beckman. (pictured, top) “Running the MPAR course alongside the BRAID conference provided the students with that experience, as well as a front-row seat to the most cutting-edge methods and frameworks used in customer-centered design and innovation.”
Through the MPAR course, four student teams were assigned to each of 10 separate BRAID company projects in December. Each team was asked to conduct research and develop insights over the break, and worked with the companies’ executives to develop solutions, tapping into what they learned in their core Problem Finding, Problem Solving course, which teaches design thinking and creative problem framing.
At the conference, the roundtable members participated in separate sessions on Friday, and joint sessions with students to mentor them on their work on Saturday.
PayPal, which posed the gas pumping challenge, left the conference with ideas for improving the gas-purchasing experience, including ways for customers to better manage their fuel budget and save money.
The student team winning this year’s MPAR Cup trophy for their creative solution for PayPal included Tejkiran Balijepalli, William Huang, Jon Moreno, Ravi Prakash, and Bryan Shieh.