News & Events
Upcoming Events
- The 2012-13 season of the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum concluded with the 15th Annual UC Berkeley Startup Competition Finalist Presentations and Awards Ceremony on April 25, 2013. Please check back in the fall.
- The 2012-13 season of the Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series has concluded. Please check back in the fall.
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The Haas Alumni Network, East Bay Chapter, cordially invites you to spend an evening with Professor Emeritus and Former Dean, Raymond Miles on Wednesday, May 8, 2013. He will discuss his work addressing Collaborative Inter-firm Entrepreneurship: A Competitive Strategy of Continuous Innovation.
In addition to learning about this work at the leading edge of organization and strategy you will have an opportunity to network with your fellow alumni. This is also an excellent chance for Bay Area Haas Alumni who were students when Professor Miles was Dean (1983 – 1991) to become reacquainted with Professor Miles and with fellow students. It is also a chance to see the Skydeck facility that houses the UC Berkeley Startup Accelerator. Click here to register.
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The Lester Center sponsors mentorship opportunities each semester for current UC Berkeley students and recent graduates (those who graduated within the past two years). Availability of appointments with mentors is announced by e-mail ONLY. If you'd like to sign up for e-mail announcements, you can do so on our Contact page. Click here for information on our mentoring program.
News
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Skydeck Featured in Forbes
Skydeck and other Lester Center programs are featured in a Forbes article dated 5/14/2013: "Student Entrepreneurship Is Humming At Elite Universities." Read more.
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2013 Bplan Winners Announced!
on Thursday, April 25th:
Grand Prize: Resido Medical
IT & Web: SweatGuru
Energy & Cleantech: Seismos
Products & Services: Produk.me
Life Sciences: Resido Medical
Peoples Choice: Eventable
Elevator Pitch: Fresh Picks
Read more >
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The Finalists of the 2013 UC Berkeley Startup Competition will present at the Finals and Awards Ceremony on Thursday, April 25th:
IT & Web:
Eventable
SweatGuru
Energy & Cleantech:
Elucid
Seismos
Products & Services:
Produk.me
Pristine Solutions
Life Sciences:
Resido Medical
DiAssess
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The Lester Center Congratulates the Winners of the 2013 Global Social Venture Competition Finals on
Friday, April 12th:First Place/People's Choice Award: Faso Soap
Second Place: Carbon Roots International
Third Place: PulpWorks, Inc.
Quick Pitch Award: Jorsey Ashbel Farms
Read more.
- SkyDeck Application Cycle Open Through April 19
Apply now for the next cohort of the SkyDeck | Berkeley acceleration program. Attend one of the upcoming information sessions and learn more. Read more.
- In Memory of Hansoo Lee
On March 4, 2013, Hansoo Lee, Haas School of Business alum (MBA 2010) and co-founder of Magoosh, lost his 15-month battle with lung cancer. To hnor his memory, his co-founders and classmates have created the Hansoo Lee Fellowship. The Fellowship will provide a stipend and mentorship to help Berkeley-Haas MBA students pursue their venture full-time for their summer internship, as Hansoo did. To learn more, and donate to the Fellowship, click here.
- Kawasaki Video Available
The UC Berkeley Startup Competition (Bplan) proudly welcomed Guy Kawasaki to the Haas School of Business on March 7, 2013. Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple and co-founder of Garage Technology Ventures, explained the top ten mistakes that entrepreneurs make. His talk covered all stages of a startup from inception to exit. Video is now available for Guy Kawasaki's special presentation on the "Top Ten Mistakes of Entrepreneurs". Click here for the video.
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The Economist features Mark Coopersmith
Lester Center lecturer and entrepreneur Mark Coopersmith was featured in the Economist for re-shoring jobs from China. Read the article. See a video interview with Mark.
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Lester Center to head Bay Area NSF I-Node
The University of California, Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford University are collaborating on an educational program aimed at commercializing university research and fostering innovation locally and nationally, thanks to a three-year, $3.75 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program is based on the Lean LaunchPad curriculum developed by Steve Blank at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and in Stanford's Technology Ventures Program.
The “I-Corps Node: NSF Bay Area Regional I-Node Program” is one of three new Innovation Corps (or I-Corps) Nodes that the NSF is establishing across the United States, the NSF announced yesterday, Feb. 21, 2013. The goal of I-Corps is to increase the impact of NSF-funded research by setting up innovation ecosystems within universities that will train the next generation of entrepreneurs, encourage partnerships between academia and industry, and commercialize science and technology. The resources of the program are available to NSF principal investigators and their graduate students, as well as local and national startups.
“The NSF has built an incredibly smart program to bring together the best of science and technology invention with all the advances we have made in teaching entrepreneurship over the past decade,” says node manager André Marquis. “Given our unique location within the national network for entrepreneurship, we have a great deal to bring to the I-Corps network.”
The San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley Node is coordinated by UC Berkeley in collaboration with UCSF and Stanford University. The node is headed by Richard Lyons, dean of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank, entrepreneurship lecturer at Berkeley and Stanford. André Marquis, executive director of the Haas School’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, serves the role of Node manager. They are joined by co-investigators Erik Lium, PhD, assistant vice chancellor of Innovation, Technology & Alliances at UCSF, and Riitta Katila, associate professor of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University.
Read more.
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NSF Grant gets Coverage in Daily Cal
February 26, 2013 issues of The Daily Californian featured the Lester Center's recently announced NSF grant. Read more.
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Skydeck Wins Catalyst Award
Sydeck won the Catalyst Award at the first-ever East Bay Innovation Awards celebration Jan. 31 in Oakland.
Read more.
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Bplan Winners Get Funded
TubeMogul, founded by Brett Wilson, John Hughes, and Mark Rotblat, all MBA 07, and 2007 Bplan winner, has raised a $20 million Series C round of funding. Read more.
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Bplan Winner Invited to White House
Nikhil Arora, co-founder of Back to the Roots, a winner in the 2012 Bplan, was invited to the White House with 14 other entrepreneurs. Read more. Watch the TV interview video.
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Greenway Grameen Infra, a team of student entrepreneurs from India, has won the Grand Prize at the 8th Annual Intel Global Challenge at UC Berkeley on November 8, 2012. IGC is a global business plan competition that rewards student entrepreneurs who tackle some of the world's most pressing issues with innovative ideas. Nanoly Bioscience, 2012 UC Berkeley Startup Competition Elevator Pitch Winner, took home one of the $15,000 best-of-category awards for Social Innovation and tied for the Audience Favorite Award. Read the Press Release.
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Skydeck Call for Applications: Applications are now available for the fall-winter 2012 class of Skydeck startups. Info sessions will be held on Oct. 24 and Nov. 1. Read more.
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The second annual Hacking Health: UC Berkeley’s Digital Health Hackathon was held at the Skydeck on September 21-22, 2012.
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Lester Hosts Lean LaunchPad Program
Berkeley-Haas is proud to host over 60 entrepreneurship educators from around the country for the The Lean LaunchPad Educators Program on August 22-24, 2012. This cutting edge program is sponsored by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) in partnership with the Lester Center of Entrepreneurship and Epicenter: National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation.
The Lean LaunchPad approach embraces the business model canvas and the customer development process as cornerstones of a live discovery experience. It emphasizes experiential learning, a flipped classroom and immediate feedback as a way to engage students with real world entrepreneurship. Students learn by proposing and immediately testing hypotheses. They get out of the classroom and talk to customers, partners and competitors and encounter the chaos and uncertainty of commercializing innovations and creating new ventures.
This process is at the core of Haas' own Lean LaunchPad class pioneered by Steve Blank as well as the National Science Foundation I-Corps Program. It is co-taught with Lester Center Founding Executive Director Emeritus Jerry Engel and NCIIA Executive Director Phil Weilerstein.
Click to learn more about: NCIIA and the program, Steve Blank's book The Startup Owner's Manual and the NSF Innovation Corps.
- Skydeck Director Appointed
The Lester Center, the College of Engineering and the Vice Chancellor for Research are pleased to welcome Jeff Burton as Skydeck’s new Executive Director. Read more >
- The Lester Center Welcomes Toby Stuart
The Lester Center is very pleased to welcome Dr. Toby E. Stuart as our new Faculty Director. He comes to us from Harvard and has been a visiting professor at Berkeley-Haas since fall 2010 and acting Faculty Director since July 2011. Read more.
- Lester Center Celebrates A Great Year
In early May, friends of the Lester Center gathered to celebrate the accomplishments of the previous year and to recognize those who make Entrepreneurship@Berkeley great. The evening program included program updates by Lester Center executive director Andre Marquis, along with presentations of the 2012 Turner Fellowships, Larson Scholarships, Appel Awards, and Holton Teaching Fellowships. Read more.
- Traverie wins Second Place in California Dreamin'
Traverie, a travel discovery startup and a finalist in the UC Berkeley Startup Competition, won Second Place in Chapman University's inaugural California Dreamin' Business Plan Competition, winning $25,000. Read more.
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CONGRATULATIONS to the Winners of the 2012 UC Berkeley Startup Competition!
Grand Prize & Life Sciences: Calcula Technologies, Energy: Harbo Technologies, IT & Web: Kloudless, Inc., Products & Services and People's Choice: Back to the Roots, Elevator Pitch: Nanoly. Click here to read more about the winners and the event. Click here for the Finals video on YouTube. Click here to see photos of the event.
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CONGRATULATIONS to the 2012 Winners of the Global Social Venture Competition! First Place: Spill. Second Place: Greennovation. Third Place: Exygen. Social Impact Assessment Award: FasoProt. People's Choice Quick Pitch Award: Watsi. Read more.
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Annie's leaps 89 percent in IPO
Congrats to Lester Center Advisory Board Member John Foraker (MBA 94) on the white-hot debut for Annie's Naturals. Since its founding in 1989, Annie’s has focused on selling healthful versions of popular foods — macaroni and cheese, pretzels, graham crackers, and more — containing as many natural and organic ingredients as possible. Read more.
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Berkeley Team Wins VCIC Regionals, Advances to the International Round
The Berkeley team of CrossCal Associates took the top spot at the Regionals of the Venture Capital Investment Competition. Berkeley advances to the international round for the first time since 2005. Click here for more information.
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Haas startup TubeMogul wins Award
Bplan 2007 First Place Winner TubeMogul is named the seventh fastest growing private company in the Bay Area. Read more >
- Winners of the Intel Global Challenge at UC Berkeley
The Intel Global Challenge at UC Berkeley is a global business plan competition that encourages student entrepreneurs and rewards innovative ideas that have the potential to have a positive impact on society. The Intel Foundation will award a total of $100,000 in cash prizes, $50,000 of which went to Forward.
Second place and $20,000 was awarded to Maxygen-mobile DNA of Russia for inventing a low-cost, portable DNA test solution that can be used at the point of care to quickly identify thousands of infectious diseases, genetic predispositions and hereditary conditions. The $10,000 third-place prize went to NanoDiagX of Egypt, which used gold nanoparticles to develop a virus test that can detect Hepatitis C in less than an hour, and at one-tenth the cost of current commercial tests.
Read the Full Press Release
See the Full Challenge Program (pdf)
- Archived News.
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