Director's Message

I want to welcome you to the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business. My name is Dr. Arthur Boni, and I am the director of the Jones Center and the John R. Thorne Professor of Entrepreneurship.

It seems like every time I write one of these messages, I comment that the “pace of change at the Jones Center continues to accelerate.” This time is no exception as we have continued to innovate and evolve our academic, experiential, and research programs over the last academic year.

On the academic side we moved forward with a major renovation of our second-year MBA capstone project course, now titled Designing and Leading a Business. This course now incorporates “design thinking,” interdisciplinary teams and entrepreneurial leadership. It is co-taught by me, Laurie Weingart (from the Tepper Organizational Behavior group) and Shelley Evenson (from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design). The class includes all of the Entrepreneurship in Organizations students as well as students from the School of Design.

The three of us piloted this course over the last three summers as we worked on projects with Intel and the UPMC Health System. This year we had a number of exciting corporate-sponsored projects with the Foundation for Enterprise Development, The Technology Collaborative (TTC) and the Mayo Clinic. All of these deal with innovation in global fields such as alternative energy, biopharma and health care. The TTC project is designing a new “markets-first” approach to commercializing robotics technologies in industries that can be disrupted. A paper is being prepared to describe our program.

We completed the second class of our re-branded Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program (CIEP) in Doha, Qatar. We had 45 students undertaking 12 exciting projects at the Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP). The steering group for CIEP is being developed and now includes about a dozen major global technology companies that are resident at QSTP. We anticipate that these relationships will benefit our programs in Doha and Pittsburgh.

On the experiential side we have been working hard to assign mentors and assist our Swartz Fellows with summer internships. Our alumni networks in Pittsburgh, Silicon Valley, Boston and other locations have been immensely helpful in moving this important activity forward. We also hosted the sixth-annual McGinnis Venture Competition in March with tracks in life science, technology, and sustainable technology (or clean-tech). We also have enjoyed an exciting spring with our James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Leadership Series; five leading innovators visited our campus to speak and interact with the Swartz Fellows.

Research has not been a major part of our agenda at the Jones Center. We are now addressing that issue and have begun to build research collaborations in partnership with other groups in the Tepper School. The Foundation for Enterprise Development is funding an 18-month study where we are investigating new business models, open- innovation networks, private-public partnerships and capitalization models employing broad-based ownership.

This work, targeted at the biopharma and alternative-energy industries, is part of a collaboration that includes MIT, UCSD and San Diego State University. Professors Lester Lave and Laurie Weingart and I are leading the work. We have engaged several second-year MBA students, and we will also be supporting a Ph.D. student. We have plans to develop some additional research around our “markets-first” approach to robotics and extend that to other technology fields as well. This work will focus on disruptive innovation and the interdisciplinary team process.

Please visit our site to learn more about our programs, our faculty, academic endeavors and entrepreneurial education programs.

Arthur A. Boni, Ph.D.
Director - Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship
John R. Thorne Professor of Entrepreneurship