In
the late 1990s, Robert S. Sullivan, then-Dean of the Kenan-Flagler
Business School at the University of North Carolina, got a call
from California. A steering committee from UCSD was looking for
help developing a new business school and it sought the advice
of Sullivan, a 30-year veteran of some the nation’s best-known
and highly regarded M.B.A. programs. Sullivan had taught at schools
as varied as Addis Abba University in Ethiopia and Carnegie Mellon
in Pittsburgh, and worked with many brilliant academic colleagues
conducting research; he’d seen thousands of gifted students;
and he’d reviewed plenty of exciting and imaginative courses
and curricula. But he’d also perceived a glaring and widespread
shortcoming: “Most business schools are not well integrated
into their campus community,” he says.
Sullivan immediately recognized that UCSD had a unique opportunity:
it could build a program from scratch specifically designed to
leverage the campus’ strengths, including its world class
life science and technology departments, as well as the vibrant,
entrepreneurial business community that surrounds it. “Within
five miles we have the highest density of Ph.D.s in the United
States,” Sullivan says. “Yet, every study pointed out
that the Achilles heel of this region has been that it’s
one of the only innovation communities in the country without a
top-ranked business school.” Sullivan soon signed on as the
new school’s founding dean and began an intense and successful
push to raise the money and recruit a faculty to fill that gap.
Today, sitting in the conference room adjoining his office in brand
new Otterson Hall, now home of UCSD’s Rady School of Management,
Sullivan, who also holds the Stanley and Pauline Foster Endowed
Chair, says proudly, “This is the school the innovation community
wanted.”
 Sullivan’s success in raising more than $90 million to fund
that effort was impressive by any measure, but all the more remarkable
given two factors: first, there was no existing business school
alumni base to tap; secondly, the UC Regents gave their approval
for the project in 2001 just as the “dot com boom” was
going bust and taking many would-be philanthropists with it. Sullivan
says that what made the school a reality was the tremendous support
of the local business community, including a $30 million gift from
local financial services entrepreneur Ernest Rady. “I knew
San Diego needed this facility,” says Rady, founder of Westcorp,
now owned
by Wachovia. “Its mission filled the legacy I want to leave—to
give others the chance to enjoy a business career as much as I
have enjoyed mine.”
That pivotal commitment triggered a wellspring within the community.
The 50,000 square-foot Otterson Hall (named for the late William
Otterson, co-founder of UCSD CONNECT, the regional development
organization) for example, was built using entirely private funding
from 340 donors, most of them local business people and companies.
Explains Sullivan: “Ernest Rady bet on our future without
any track record. He provided the credibility that allowed us to
get others on board.”
 From then on, progress was steady: The school’s Center for
Executive Development began offering non-degree programs to local
business professionals in 2003. The first part-time “FlexMBA” students
began taking classes in 2004. And the first full-time M.B.A. class
showed up in the fall of 2005 just as construction of Otterson
was beginning, with classes meeting in Pepper Canyon Hall and other
nooks and crannies. On a bright and wind-buffeted June 18, that
first full-time class of ’07 graduated from the nearly complete
courtyard outside the dramatic Otterson, a modern, bright building
whose design evokes a ship with plenty of open-air decks headed
for the Pacific Ocean.
It may have an impressive building, but what’s really setting
Rady apart is its innovation agenda: “A disproportionate
number of our students have advanced degrees” in engineering,
science and technology fields, Sullivan notes. Members of the class
of ’07 , for example, include 12 students with master’s
degrees, eight Ph.D.s, and one M.D. In addition, 60 percent of
the class had an undergraduate major in science, technology or
engineering. When these students arrived, Sullivan explained, they
could “speak the language of science but they weren’t
credible with business analysts.”
Making those students what Sullivan calls “bi-lingual and
bi-cultural” in business, too, involves several efforts,
the most specific being Rady’s Lab2Market, a three-course
sequence that begins in the classroom and moves into project-based
environments. The school describes it as an “immersion” in
the real opportunities and business plans for real companies. Already,
two companies that began as Lab2Market projects have been founded
by Rady M.B.A. alumni. Additionally, On Amir, an assistant professor
of marketing who came to Rady from Yale, fields four or five calls
a month from local companies, looking for help from his students.
And in just two years, the students have completed dozens of independent
study projects with companies, ranging from biotech concerns, big
tech companies and a mutual fund to a high-end restaurant. Essentially
they are exchanging real-life problem-solving experience for what
amounts to millions of dollars worth of consulting services.
 New graduate Nick Boyle is emblematic of this hands-on attitude,
bringing his real-life experience to his studies at Rady. An accomplished
chemist with a Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield in England,
Boyle was leading a team of chemists for a biotech company working
on exciting new HIV treatments.
“I saw how difficult it was becoming for Ph.D. level organic
chemists to get a job in biotech/pharma,” Boyle says. Science
journals have reported that employment in the U.S. chemical industry
has been sliding in recent years and Boyle says that as recently
as 2004, “the organic chemist unemployment rate was as high
as it was at the end of World War II.” Rady’s focus
on integrating innovation in science and technology with a business
education captured his imagination, and he found himself fielding
offers from companies within weeks of simply starting the M.B.A.
program. “I attended hordes of networking meetings and took
on consulting projects with local companies, all the while putting
the classroom into context.”
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