Haas School of Business at IAB, shares entrepreneurism insights

Working group of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business comprised of David Lashley, Andrew Lee, Joe Regenbogen and Kory Vargas Caro have presented an overview of how IAB may incorporate world’s best practices and rev up its intra-preneurial and entrepreneurial culture.

Joe Regenbogen says all entrepreneurship-centric universities around the world share a set of features.

“They are normally strong in the three components, which are curriculum and its stronger focus on experiential learning, business fundamentals and mixed models that incorporate both classroom and digital learning. Such universities’ human capital is more diverse and inter-disciplinary, with access to mentors that are active in their business careers. The other element is professional faculty. An ideal structure in such universities means better resource access, technology and space as well as incentive alignment,” Joe Regenbogen said.

The team also touched upon the potential IAB model that would have to look closer into the culture shift process.

“The culture shift that will be happening might take some time. It needs to be driven by educating more pride in students to have faith in themselves and help them get empowered to become entrepreneurs. In its turn pride will need to be backed up by promotion whereby students get connected to successful Kazakh entrepreneurs. The other element is providing protection, be it legal, financial or marketing advice. Place is equally important because it enables students to have creative collisions and find a venue that will accommodate their interest in entrepreneurship and bring everyone in contact with each other,” Andrew Lee said.

The outcome of the three-week tour by the School will be a package of recommendations and hypotheses tailor-made for IAB to reach its goals on the way to becoming a more entrepreneurial university. The working group pointed out that this might require adding extra aspects to curricula and highlighting entrepreneurial achievements of students.

Kory Vargas Caro says the idea of a visiting tour came about a year ago after IAB developed a relationship with UC Berkeley during its long-term seminars in the United States and now this cooperation is turning into more collaborative projects.

“So this idea to create a more entrepreneurial university at IAB came about for a couple of reasons. One is the national strategic plan of more private enterprises because they are more efficient than state-run enterprises. Then the second reason is that a lot of the high-level staff here at IAB went to the United States last year and did a tour around the United States and entrepreneurial universities. They really saw the value of the idea and they were trying to incorporate that into IAB.”