The MBA Roundtable announced today that the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business was chosen as the 2015 winner of the MBA Roundtable Innovator Award. The MBA Roundtable Innovator Award was created to recognize and promote innovative initiatives in MBA education and to acknowledge the institutions that are driving change in the field.
This year’s award recognized the school’s Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs (TVL), which serves as a gateway to access the vast entrepreneurship resources available through the University of Texas at Austin and the local central Texas entrepreneur community.
The MBA Roundtable presented the award at the annual MBA Roundtable Curricular Innovation Symposium, hosted this year at the Olin Business School, University of Washington in St. Louis, on October 22 and 23, 2015. The Olin Business School was the inaugural recipient of the Innovator Award in 2011.
UT-Austin – Texas Venture Labs
Texas Venture Labs (TVL) is a cross-campus, interdisciplinary education and research initiative created within the McCombs School of Business to support entrepreneurship, innovation and company formation within the school and the regional business community.
“It’s a real honor to receive this award and the validation that comes with it for our efforts around innovation across our campus and in conjunction with the rich startup ecosystem in Austin” said Rob Adams, faculty founder and director of TVL. “We look forward to continuing to innovate as we grow the program and build McCombs’ entrepreneurial rankings.”
TVL provides a systematic process that involves students, faculty, and entrepreneurs through connected, interrelated programs featuring classroom and experiential education and mentoring; market and business plan development and validation; team-building and networking; and access to other business resources and funding.
“While several school have multi-disciplinary entrepreneurial programs, what sets UT-Austin apart from those programs is its success at arranging opportunities for students to present their ideas to potential investors,” notes Dr. Jay Christiansen-Szalanski, professor of management at the Tippie School of Business, University of Iowa, who served as an evaluator and selection judge.
MBA Roundtable Innovator Award Finalists
- Duquesne University for their Action Learning Curriculum, which features three semesters of cross-functionally taught core courses. They are paired with live, progressive problem-solving consulting engagements that help solve complex contemporary challenges faced by private, public, and nonprofit organizations and serve as a proving ground for tying theory to practice;
- University of California- Berkeley Haas School of Business for their Silicon Valley Immersion Week, an intensive and transformative “field immersion” in the MBA for Executives program that has increased experiential learning to 25 percent of the curriculum. Students gain an insider’s understanding of the Silicon Valley business, culture, and entrepreneurial ecosystem and develop an entrepreneurial skill set focused on analyzing ideas and balancing passion with practicality; and
- University of Houston Downtown for their Corporate Driven Curriculum, which employed an extensive methodology that engaged corporate representatives and faculty to define the knowledge that was needed in the business world and develop corresponding learning goals. It has drawn the college closer to the business community and attracted more students, who leave better positioned to deliver and perform in their organizations.
About the MBA Roundtable
The MBA Roundtable is a collaborative, nonprofit organization that facilitates the exchange of information and resources on MBA curricular innovation. More than 160 business schools from across the world are members of the MBA Roundtable, which was founded in 1995.
For more information, visit www.mbaroundtable.org.
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