Innovation and Apple case competition

Everything at Haas is about innovation. Not only do we speak about it, we live and experience it everyday through interacting with classmates, joining club activities, sitting in speaker series speeches and participating case competitions.

This Monday in my "Life as an Entreprenuer" speaker series class, I was deeply inspired by the speaker Judy Estrin. Before the speech I was struggling to figure out if I can ever be innovative. After the speech I became much more clear where I was lacking and what I should do in order to motivate others to be innovative.
So innovation, in essense, can be broken down into 5 core values.

• Questioning: inquisitive but not judegmental
• Risk-taking: A positive attitude towards failure
• Openess: Share with others
• Patience: but not passive
• Trust: but not blind faith

Innovation can only be nurtured not managed. It needs to be cultivated and free from measures.

To challenge myself, I entered the Apple case competition with my three other classmates. The case is about what Apple should do to with iPhone to repeat this success of ipod in a very different industry where the players are decades old, well entrenched and unaccustomed to rapid change? and How should Apple measure success with iPhone and its ecosystem? I have to say I really love the aethestic design and user-friendly aspect of iphone. Above all, it's just VERY cool to have one.

I am learning so much about this industry and having a lot of fun working with my classmates. Although sometimes it kills me when I work with people who goes off tangent without a clear structure, I know I have to learn to deal with it and be more patient in understanding other people's perspective. I understand in order to froster innovation, I need to be more patient and more willing to open my mind to accept different communication styles

Social alert

Every week, the social rep of the MBAA , Newton, would send out an email reminding everyone all the important seocial event for that week. What I absolutely love about these emails is it not only the fact that it makes it much easier for us to keep track of the social events, Newton would write an anecdote which highlights the true spirit of Haas. Below is my favoriate one:


9/11
First year cohort elections are in progress, and first years are probably learning how ridiculously collaborative a school this really is. Last year, I basically negotiated with Emily Walling and then ran unopposed for Axe social rep. The negotiation went something like this:

Me: Emily, we’re both running for social rep, but I think you should take the position.
Emily: Oh no, I could never do that. You be social rep. I’ll run for communications rep.
Me: Awwww, you’re such a sweetie.
Emily: Stop, you’re making me blush!
Me: Oh you. Have you gotten your textbooks yet? Here, take mine until yours arrive from Amazon.
Emily: You look tired, let me carry you to your next class.

As you can see, Haas is not quite a shark tank. We don’t just hug trees, we live in them.

This is clearly one aspect of Haas that exceeded my expectation

*This photo was posted on the 10/1 social alert