Entrepreneurship and Management

Global challenges require global innovations that create broad social and economic opportunities. Properly and effectively addressing today’s global challenges requires one to establish a new understanding of the nature of business and value, an understanding that enables us to address at once socio-economic challenges, environmental challenges, and challenges related to the increasing pace of change, especially change that arises from new technology and the human behavior responding to that technology.  The University of California Merced is, in many ways, uniquely positioned to take on that challenge, in the context of a rigorous and focused program integrating concepts of entrepreneurship, innovation and management throughout the academic core of the institution.  UCM is uniquely positioned to create new and novel management and entrepreneurship programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and to lead in research and practice in areas of management relevant to the Central Valley, California, the US, and beyond.

The San Joaquin Valley directly faces many of the grand challenges seen in our society in general: air quality, clean water, access to clean energy, access to good healthcare, and socio-economic disparities fueled by the lack of jobs. It is increasingly clear that the solution to these challenges is found at the intersection of technical issues and societal and policy issues.  Research priorities should be set at these intersections. For example,

• How can policies and incentives be exploited to increase technological innovation and its diffusion, advance efficient health delivery systems, reduce health disparities, improve environmental conditions, promote trade, improve the spatial organization of commerce and peoples, increase the efficiency of local and higher governance, promote regional growth and efficient adjustment to migration, reduce economic and social inequality, and improve efficiency in the organization   of retail, on-line and other markets?  
• How can technology be used to meet contemporary business and policy challenges generally? More specifically, how can data analytics enable better management of natural resources?  
• How can management of technology promote better access to healthcare?  
• How can entrepreneurial activities promote job growth locally?  
• How can better understanding of services yield better management of public services and public resources?  
• How can sustainable business models help align value propositions across different interest group to help avoid conflict and create socio-economic and environmental change?  

It is increasingly clear that such complex questions can best be addressed in cross-functional environments, with the broader systems-approach aiding us in addressing new research questions, which in turn can inform practice.  Given UCM’s focus on strong interdisciplinary programs in such areas as sustainability and health, its high degree of emphasis in STEM fields, its strong sense of community and its nascent philanthropic support for providing management expertise, a focus on Entrepreneurship and Management is a key component in expanding our academic areas of emphasis.