PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

Global Reach
A. Privett, S.J, and a January 2007 tour of 18 USF MBA students visiting businesses and nonprofit
organizations. During the past three years, 13 USF students have spent a year or a semester
studying abroad in India.
USF’s Center for the Pacific Rim held a “mini-festival” on India in 2007, featuring five public
programs on India, and honored Indian born entrepreneur and Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia
at its 20th Anniversary Gala in April 2008.
The Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) in the Center for Science, Technology, and
Society at Santa Clara University has worked with more than forty “social enterprises”
in India to develop innovative business models that enable a new breed of “social
entrepreneurs” to achieve significant scale. One example, a reverse osmosis system that was
serving one million customers two years ago, will be serving more than fifteen million people in
three years. Innovative businesses nurtured at GSBI illustrate how challenging problems like access
to safe water, the productivity of small holder farms, and access to financial services for the
unbanked can be addressed through low-cost solutions. Insights from GSBI's work in India are
attracting growing interest in the possibility of serving the poorest of the poor though user-centered
product, service, and process innovation that radically reduces costs.
The Alumni Conundrum
Global alumni networks can play a vital role in a university’s ability to:
• raise funds and attract endowments;
• provide employment and entrepreneurial networking contacts for graduating students; and
• link with universities, research laboratories, companies and government bodies
worldwide on joint research and collaborative exchanges.
Through its overseas alumni, a university is additionally able to stay current with market and
social trends, leverage complementary work and funding support, and enhance the university’s
overall stature abroad. Alumni organizations often serve as parallel professional networking
organizations, both in the home country and overseas.
UC Berkeley’s estimated 800 alumni living in India, and Stanford’s 400, represent an impressive
resource of talent and connections. Yet the connections between these alumni and their schools
remain relatively weak, especially when compared to the role played by their Chinese counterparts
in cross-border business development and exchanges.
Both universities maintain contact with their India alumni in the context of arranging visits,
hosting industry or public policy conferences, facilitating individual contacts and so on. Neither
school, however, has a distinct Indian alumni group on the order of the Berkeley Chinese
International Alumni Association or the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford
(FACES), or a distinct development entity such as the Berkeley China International Association
(although the Stanford Office of Asian Relations does broadly perform such a function for Asia
as a whole, including India).
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