CREATING A COLLEGE: A DYNAMIC FIRST 20 YEARS
In September 2012, the Poole College of Management’s name, carved into two panels of granite, was installed above the front doors of Nelson Hall on the main campus of North Carolina State University. The courtyard entrance to Nelson also features the Poole College name. Both entrances reflect how far the college has come since 1992, when it was established as NC State University’s 10th college.
In announcing his $37.5 million endowed gift to the college in December 2010 – making it NC State’s first named college – Lonnie C. Poole, Jr., founder of Waste Industries, said he wanted to support a program that would have an impact on the future of business. He chose to support the university’s young College of Management because of what the college’s dean, Ira Weiss, and the university’s chancellor, Randy Woodson, saw for its future.
“Three things really intrigued me,” Poole said at the time. “They wanted more focus on entrepreneurial development. And they wanted more of an environmental focus, and sustainability.” As an entrepreneur who became a leader in environmentally responsible waste management, he connected with that vision.
Three years prior, Ben Jenkins, vice-chairman and president of the General Bank, Wachovia (retired), gave a similar response in 2007 when asked about his endowed gift to the college, which named its Jenkins Graduate Programs and established three named professorships, in accounting, business management and economics. With the continually evolving role of technology in business and industry, Jenkins said he saw great value in the college’s focus, especially in its graduate programs, on innovation and technology management and made his gift commitment to help support the growth of those programs. The Jenkins Graduate School of Management is named in honor of his commitment, and includes the college's MBA, Master of Global Innovation Management (MGIM) and MGIM-Global Luxury Management, Master of Accounting, and Economics master's and doctoral programs.
Both benefactors are NC State alumni: Poole graduated in 1959 from the College of Engineering; Jenkins in 1968 from the College of Textiles.
The sections below will take you through the early days of the college. The categories to the right reflect the evolution of Poole College.
Creating a Physical Space
Building a Faculty
Early Academic-Company Partnerships
Responding To Changing Needs
Going Global
FROM THE START: A FOCUS ON TECHNOLOGY
The focus on technology became a clear choice early on for the faculty charged with building the new college of management’s academic programs after establishing the college had been approved by the University of North Carolina General Administration (UNC-GA) on June 12, 1992.
Dr. Richard (Dick) Lewis, then dean of the business school at Michigan State University, had visited NC State in 1990 to lead the assessment committee that studied the feasibility for establishing the new college, building it from the faculty that had been teaching accounting, business management and economics as part of the Department of Economics and Business in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS).
“Once the committee made the decision to recommend that the university establish a college of management, we then had to start talking about what kind of college it would be, and the thing that struck all of us was the technological emphasis at NC State,” Lewis said, citing the College of Engineering and College of Textiles, which, he said, “is very unique and highly technologically oriented,” as well as the colleges of forestry, veterinary medicine and design.
“That led us to say, ‘emphasize that – that’s going to make you very different from any other business school in this state, especially at the master’s level',” Lewis said. The committee also decided that the Master of Science in Management (MSM) degree, with its technological orientation, was “the right one for the college at the time,” he said.
Dr. Robert Clark, who currently has a Zelnak Professorship in the college, served as interim dean from the time time college status was approved in 1992 until Lewis returned in 1993 to serve as its first dean. About six months later, Lewis asked Clark to lead the faculty as it began to transition the new college’s curriculum from the liberal arts focus it had as part of CHASS’s economics and business department to align with curriculum requirements set by the AACSB International, the American Association for the Collegiate Schools of Business which accredits business schools. "He did a fantastic job," Lewis said.
At the same time, the college’s faculty was re-organized into its three initial academic departments: accounting, business management, and economics. The business management department included faculty in business, finance, marketing, human resources, strategy and other business disciplines.
“Bob and the rest of the faculty worked really hard” to put all the academic programs in place, said Dr. Jon Bartley, professor of accounting who became the college’s second dean in 1999. He served with Lewis as associate dean for academic affairs during the accreditation preparations.
The college was initially accredited by the AACSB in 2000 and has been reviewed and approved for continuing accreditation every five years since.
CREATING A PHYSICAL SPACE
As the faculty worked through all the details of establishing a new college – while continuing to teach those already enrolled in accounting, business and economics courses – the university’s architects began another significant undertaking: rebuilding Nelson Hall’s interior to accommodate the classrooms, offices and other spaces needed by the new college.
If you ask any of Poole College’s more senior faculty or staff members who made the transition from CHASS to their new academic home in Nelson, you will hear stories of skid loaders and jackhammers working their way through the building for the college’s first eight years or so.
Nelson Hall was initially home to NC State’s College of Textiles, which needed a heavily reinforced infrastructure with cavernous spaces to accommodate weaving looms and other heavy textiles equipment. Converting that into classrooms and offices for the business school made for a noisy, fluid work environment, with temporary classrooms and offices moved around the building as the renovation project progressed. “It wasn’t a very pleasant process,” said Lewis, who as dean was also recruiting new faculty in the midst of the renovation.
“We had no real offices, just corners of floors temporarily cordoned off,” said Dr. Shannon Davis, now is associate dean for undergraduate programs and one of the first new professors to join the college. Davis, who taught human resources, recalled having a corner of the third floor as her office space, with the rest of the floor being vacant as construction continued. Classes were held in various buildings across campus during the renovation process.
When completed, the renovation project provided Nelson Hall with 17 classrooms, plus department and faculty offices on each of its four floors. Half of the fourth floor includes both the college’s Department of Economics and CALS’ Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics; they jointly teach the economics masters’ and doctoral programs.
Eight of the new classrooms had tiered seating, accommodating more students than a flat classroom and providing enhanced student-professor communications by their improved line-of-sight vision. Contributions from Caterpillar, Wachovia, and other companies provided funds to install the latest in instructional technology as the classrooms were being built.
The Nelson Hall auditorium – at one time a movie theater, Bartley said – was renovated to update its projection and sound equipment, enhancing its effectiveness as a lecture hall. Teaching and walk-in computer labs also were created in the basement level of the building.
Today, while continued growth of the college means space remains tight in Nelson Hall, full time faculty have their own offices, and MAC, MBA and Graduate Economics students have their own study areas. A multi-purpose student commons on the second floor now includes a Port City Java café as well as an electronic financial data board made possible by a gift from Credit Suisse, and classroom technology and furnishings upgrades continue to enhance the teaching and learning environment throughout the building.
Poole College now also has an annex – two small buildings across the street at 2806 Hillsborough St. where the founders of SAS got their start. The main building houses the offices of several of the college’s initiatives and outreach-related units: the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative, the new Consumer Innovation Consortium, Executive Programs staff and the Office of Development and External Relations. An adjacent small building houses graduate economics student offices. Renovation of these buildings was made possible by gifts from Caterpillar and Jim Owens.
BUILDING A FACULTY
New faculty – both experienced and junior faculty – were recruited from established business schools at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Minnesota, Michigan State University, Purdue University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Iowa State University, and others. Among those are current professors Steve Barr, Cecil Bozarth, Shannon Davis, Robert Handfield, Steve Markham, Lynda Aiman-Smith, and Beverly Tyler.
“I think this great faculty was attracted because they had the opportunity to create new programs, new centers, and to be part of building the college; we attracted people who wanted to build something new and better,” Bartley said.
Poole College now has about 100 faculty members organized into four department: Accounting, Business Management, Economics, and Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Within the business management and MIE departments are faculty groups based on academic disciplines of entrepreneurship, finance, human resources, information technology, management of technology, marketing, organizational behavior and leadership, strategy, and supply chain and operations.
Many of the faculty also are aligned with the college's centers and initiatives, by discipline and research interest, as described in the Industry Connections part of this report. An overview of these academic-industry partnerships is provided below. Information about the faculty's sponsored research and publications is posted in the Research area of the college's website, and are also described in the Advancing Knowledge section of this report.
EARLY ACADEMIC-COMPANY PARTNERSHIPS
Jenkins Master of Accounting
The college’s first new graduate program was the Master of Accounting program, established in 1993. Enrollment has grown from its initial 30 students to 121 in 2012-13. Strong relationships with the Big Four and mid-level accounting firms have led to consistently strong placement rates for the program’s graduates, with 100 percent of the 2012 graduates employed.
Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialization
One of the challenges with new technology is how to commercialize it. Dr. Angus Kingon, in NC State’s College of Engineering, and Dr. Steve Markham in Poole College worked together on an NSF-funded project to develop a methodology for assessing the commercialization potential of new technology. That methodology came to be known as the TEC Algorithm – standing for technology entrepreneurship commercialization – which continues to be taught through the HiTEC program.
HiTEC is part of The Entrepreneurship Collaborative, a new initiative established in Poole College in 2012 that includes the college’s Jenkins MBA concentration in entrepreneurship and technology commercialization and a certificate program for graduate students not pursing an MBA degree. MSM graduates Michael Zapata and Tony O’Driscoll were among the first students to use the algorithm in their coursework. Both have continued to support the college by mentoring students in this concentration or by teaching orientation sessions for incoming MBA students.
HiTEC now is part of one of the college’s new initiatives, The Entrepreneurship Collaborative (TEC), which serves as a portal for the area’s entrepreneurship community to engage with Poole College’s graduate and undergraduate students in entrepreneurship and their faculty.
Supply Chain Management
Another academics-related initiative established early on was the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative (SCRC), led by Dr. Robert Handfield, one of the college’s initial cohort of new faculty. SCRC pairs teams of supply chain and operations students with partner companies to work on real world projects as part of the college’s supply chain practicum courses.
SCRC began with four partner companies in 2000. As of January 2013, it had 18 partner companies and its students had completed more than 500 company-led projects. Company support provides scholarships for supply chain undergraduate students and fellowships for MBA students in the supply chain concentration; the fellows work directly with their sponsor companies in the course of the year, gaining experience that may lead to full time employment with the sponsor company.
Innovation Management
During the course of Bartley’s term as second dean of the college, “We brought the Center for Innovation Management Studies (CIMS) down from Lehigh University, where it had been for about 20 years, along with its extensive library of innovation-related research reports and documentation,” he said. CIMS continues to support the development of new tools and other research activity that enables companies to be more innovative throughout the organization.
Poole College’s Jenkins graduate students and its executive development clients are learning to use those tools through courses in the MBA program’s biosciences management concentration, the MGIM program, and executive development programs delivered by the North Carolina State Executive Education (NCSEE), through which Poole College delivers its Executive Programs. Use of big data analytics techniques is one of its newest applications being incorporated into Jenkins MBA courses and executive development programs, especially in biosciences management.
Innovation management also has been integrated into the MBA curriculum from the start, through the Innovation Management concentration. The concentration is led in Poole College by Dr. John McCreery in the Department of Business Management, and team-taught with faculty in NC State's colleges of engineering, design and textiles. The curriculum is constantly being refreshed as advances in innovation tools and technology – such as 3-D printing of prototypes – open new options for the student teams. Included in the concentration is the Product Innovation Lab, one of Forbe's Top 10 Most Innovative Business Courses. This concentration prepares students to provide innovative marketable solutions in respose to losely defined needs provided by the project's sponsoring companies.
The college now has six centers and initiatives that enable businesses to easily connect with the college for research, discipline-specific expertise, and access to students for projects-based learning, internships and full-time employment. Both students and employers benefit from the relationships formed, which also lead to new areas of research for Poole College faculty.
- BioSciences Management, supporting the Jenkins MBA biosciences concentration
- Center for Innovation Management Studies, working closely with the Jenkins MBA and MGIM programs and NCSEE
- Consumer Innovation Consortium
- Enterprise Risk Management Initiative
- Supply Chain Resource Cooperative
- Sustainability (in process)
- The Entrepreneurship Collaborative
RESPONDING TO CHANGING NEEDS
Poole College continually assesses and updates its graduate and undergraduate programs to assure they are aligned with current needs in the marketplace, both in content and method of delivery. Industry advisory boards have provided a vital link to the business community from the very start of the college, Bartley said, and the college now has six advisory boards working with the college’s dean, its centers and initiatives, or individual academic departments.
The first major change in an academic program was converting the Master of Science of Management (MSM) degree program to the Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree in 2002. It was not just a change in the name; the curriculum also was expanded to include more management courses, said Dr. Steve Allen, associate dean for graduate programs.
The Jenkins MBA program continues to adjust as industry needs and student preferences shift. That has led to the program’s seven concentrations and seven dual degree options, as well as changes in course delivery. It now offers the Full Time MBA; the Professional MBA for working professionals; and the Professional MBA Online. The Professional MBA offers two tracks: flexible and accelerated, delivered at two locations: NC State's main campus and the Jenkins MBA program's site in Research Triangle Park.
Poole College’s faculty are increasingly incorporating technology in their teaching, using equipment that captures lectures and making it available electronically for review by students or offering courses via NC State’s Distance Education and Learning Technology (DELTA) system. The Master of Accounting program continues to use Second Life as a means of providing students virtual audit experiences that represent real life scenarios. The Graduate Economics program offers workshops to prepare doctoral candidates for teaching roles in the college and beyond.
GOING GLOBAL
Today’s increasingly global marketplace requires that students in all disciplines have a greater number of meaningful experiences in international environments. “For business students, that means learning how businesses work in other countries and across borders,” said Dr. Ira Weiss, who became Poole College’s third dean in 2004.
Since then, he has forged a number of global partnerships, both at NC State University and with other business schools, that enable Poole College students to study abroad and continue to progress toward their degree at NC State. In 2009, Poole College was invited to join the International Partnership of Business Schools; in 2011, Weiss was elected to a two-year term as IPBS president. Robert Sandruck, who joined the college as director of international programs in 2011, provides logistics and other assistance for students in arranging for their international study programs. Read more
