UCSD's new School of Management was meant to stand apart from other business schools.

Conceived when the Nasdaq soared and technology was king, it was designed to focus on technology startup management and the unique challenges of the New Economy.

Tough assignment

UCSD is trying to build a new business school in a difficult climate for fund-raising.

This vision, the brainchild of influential venture capitalists and technology entrepreneurs, was the fledgling school's biggest asset.

Now, it also might be its biggest challenge.

The school, which is starting off with short courses for executives this fall, has a lot to accomplish to meet its goal of enrolling its first full-time MBA students in the fall of 2005.

The founding dean, Robert Sullivan, started work just eight months ago. But he has big ambitions: to convince the world that a 45-year-old, science-focused public university can assemble a business program that carries the same heft as old-guard schools like the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton or Northwestern's Kellogg.

To do so, he still needs to raise nearly $100 million to build an 80,000-square-foot facility and recruit a world-class faculty.

And he needs to find the money at a time when many of the school's biggest cheerleaders – mostly technology entrepreneurs – aren't necessarily in the position to be its biggest financial backers.

At the height of the tech bubble, raising millions from San Diego's burgeoning tech community looked like a cakewalk. But that early optimism faded when the New Economy revealed itself to be just the Old Cyclical Economy – and heading down.

Between the School of Management's seed stage in the late 1990s and the University of California's approval to start the school in late 2001, fund-raising became considerably tougher.

So far, commitments total about $23 million toward a goal of $115 million.

The bulk of the funding has come from one source, Irwin Jacobs, a former UCSD engineering professor and founder of local wireless telecom giant Qualcomm.

Jacobs and his wife, Joan, designated $15 million of a recent $110 million gift to UCSD to go toward launching the School of Management. Separately, Qualcomm endowed a professorship at the business school for $3.5 million.

Local real estate magnate Malin Burnham also contributed $5 million to the program. Burnham, who is part of the committee heading a $1 billion capital campaign UCSD publicly launched in March, said it's a tough time to be seeking funds.

"We're getting good response, but we're not getting flooded with contributions yet," Burnham said.

Yet Burnham is upbeat. Many of San Diego's high-tech and biomedical companies are in their infancy, he said, but people in other, non-tech industries also see the value of the school for San Diego.

The program's backers say the lack of an elite business school hurts local companies in recruiting and retaining management talent.

Both San Diego State University and the University of San Diego have MBA programs, but neither ranks in the top 50 in Business Week's widely followed ranking of business schools.

That makes San Diego one of the few tech-heavy regions in the country that doesn't have a "name-brand" business school.

For example, the San Francisco Bay Area has Stanford's Graduate School of Business and UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. The Boston area has Harvard Business School and MIT's Sloan School of Management.

UCSD made its name in science research, and a business school hadn't been part of its plan until the business community campaigned for it.

"An elite business school attracts the top people in the country," said Windward Ventures partner Martha Dennis, one of the school's early backers. "People pick name brands, and they stay and network where they went to school.

"We were losing talent in San Diego that should be staying in San Diego and forming the basis for management of San Diego's tech companies."

The edge that UCSD has over San Diego State and USD is its world renown for scientific research, with a half-dozen Nobel Prize winners on the faculty.

The thinking behind the new business school was that UCSD could draw on its reputation to build a designer MBA program that would keep talented people from leaving.

Dennis said that when she was running a telecommunications start-up, one of her engineers spent every weekend in Los Angeles at an executive MBA program at UCLA's Anderson School. The network he built there went from L.A. north, and that showed Dennis the power of those business-school connections – and why when people went off to business school elsewhere, they didn't come back.

"No matter how great local programs are, people go for name brands," Dennis said. "The name

UCSD means, 'I'm a great technology manager.' "

Timing isn't everything

The timing was off, but the concept of a tech-focused MBA program is still very much on. After all, the challenges of technology start-ups haven't gone away just because the industry is in the doldrums.

While the school faces the Herculean task of starting up in lean times, it may have found its Hercules in Sullivan, a veteran business-school manager who most recently headed the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler School.

Sullivan has embraced the challenges of starting a business school in a tough climate and building a program that departs from what's been done before.

"UCSD has been in a sense the renegade of the UC system," Sullivan said. "It's come from nowhere to somewhere by doing the extraordinary."

In Sullivan's dream, UCSD's School of Management will be a renegade among business schools, taking advantage of its blank-slate status to rethink business education.

Instead of basing admissions on a formula based on grades, standardized tests and work experience, the school will interview each applicant to determine their maturity and "passion," he said.

This is expected to result in different demographics than the typical MBA program. While the average age in U.S. business programs is 29, Sullivan said he expects UCSD's MBA students' average age to be 25.

"We don't put as much emphasis on work experience as we do on their passion, understanding and focus on working in the health sciences, science or technology industries," Sullivan said.

Most students will already be involved in some kind of entrepreneurial enterprise, he said. By the time they're out of school for several years, they'll likely be too busy running a company to go back for an MBA.

"They don't have the time in life to wait," said Sullivan of his prospective students. "They want to become engaged."

Another of his ideas is to let students work at their own pace. So certain classes – those in which teamwork and interaction are less important – will be offered online to allow students to learn on their own.

"There are some people who will work 18 hours a day – especially if they have an entrepreneurial spirit, if they're driven," Sullivan said. "If somebody should have that as part of their drive, they may get done sooner."

The new school will also ditch the traditional internship requirement. Sullivan said internships will be available, but he expects many students to want to work straight through or spend their summers working on their own startup projects.

He said the School of Management's grand experiment will be to try to thread the business program together with UCSD's medical and engineering schools and other affiliated institutions.

They're exploring a joint program on sustainable development with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, focusing on the relatively new idea of the "triple bottom line": taking care of shareholders, the environment and the community.

When all is said and done, Sullivan said, the management school will be integrated across campus in programs that exploit UCSD's scientific prowess.

Mining local support

Not everyone has hard cash to donate in the current economic climate, but Sullivan has found other ways to make the business community take ownership of the school, as he put it.

At an event that Amylin Pharmaceuticals hosted earlier this month, Sullivan said, 65 local life sciences executives pledged support to varying degrees.

Some executives promised to help recruit top-flight faculty by offering them consulting and board positions with their firms – important because UCSD will be competing with the top schools in the country for a small pool of the best faculty.

The first group of faculty must be hired by next summer.

Sullivan is also asking firms to sponsor up to 10 employees for the school's executive certificate programs, which generate hefty revenue for public universities' business schools.

And he secured commitments from several executives to work with the executive education advisory committee to design short courses and certificate programs appropriate for the industry.

Amylin Chairman and CEO Joe Cook said he hosted the event – one of many such business community rallies that have been held since Sullivan's arrival – because he sees how UCSD's program could, in essence, change the world.

"It's pretty obvious to me that it takes more than a good idea or scientific breakthrough to affect positively the lives of millions of people," Cook said. "You have to apply it in a process that makes it available in the marketplace."

Private Funding

$117.5 million: Total the school is seeking in the current Founders Phase

$50 million: 80,000-square-foot building

$20 million: Four joint centers at other schools on campus at $5 million each

$17.5 million: Five endowed professor chairs at $3.5 million each

$15 million: Three functionally themed centers within the school at $5 million each

$10 million: Endowed executive education program

$5 million: Endowed chair for school's dean

Contributions

Malin Burnham: $5 million

Joan and Irwin Jacobs: $15 million (designated part of $110 million gift to university)

Qualcomm's Jerome S. Katzin endowed chair: $3.5 million

Project timeline

October 2001: The University of California Board of Regents approves business school for UCSD campus

January 2003: Dean Robert Sullivan hired

Fall 2003: Executive education short courses to begin

July 2004: First faculty for part-time Executive MBA to start

Fall 2004: Part-time Executive MBA program starts (50-65 students)

Fall 2005: First 100 full-time MBA students to start

Summer 2006: Construction of new business school building to be completed

Fall 2006: First full class of full-time students

By 2010: 100 full-time faculty and 100 staff; 600 full-time MBA students; 600 part-time MBA students; 1,200 managers in certificate programs.