Dear CUW alumni,
Welcome to the fall 2021 edition of the Business on the Bluff Alumni Newsletter. This year also has been a year of challenges and blessings. Most notably, we were sad to see our beloved President Ferry retire as of July 1. He has served Concordia so well for so many years, and for that we are blessed. Dr. Cario, our Provost, is serving as interim President, while we search for our next leader. This year has been exciting in many other ways as well. Let me share with you some highlights, and read on if you would like more information on School of Business events of the last year.
Most notably, the summer saw the launch of our new Doctor of Business Administration program in July, with a cohort of 15 students. This degree offers three specializations, in Organizational Change and Performance, Healthcare Administration, as well as Financial and Economic Management. We also launched CU Ventures, which is a Concordia nonprofit focused on fostering entrepreneurship, innovation, investing and other commercialization activities that our students, alumni and friends are involved in. CU Ventures oversees all of the intellectual property that results from Concordia’s research activities, including six spinout companies. Associated with CU Ventures, we have also formed an Angel Investor group (Concordia Angel Network) that can invest in promising startups. One of the CU Ventures portfolio companies, Estrigenix, secured second place in the state-wide Governor’s Business Plan competition, with an investor pitch done by Master of Product Development alumna Kylee Marks. Kylee was also voted one of Wisconsin’s top 5 rising tech stars under 25 by the Milwaukee Business Journal.
As is now our tradition, we had our annual Healthcare Economics Summit in July, this time focused on the new field of Direct Primary Care, and our Next Generation Healthcare Leader students were center-stage, discussing their involvement in this exciting new way to deliver healthcare. They also discussed their involvement in a healthcare delivery Concordia spinout company, Advocates for Healthcare. This, along with our Liberty, Faith and Economics (LFE) summit, is programming associated with our Robert W. Plaster Free Enterprise Center building. In that regard, we are extremely excited to announce that we have hired a nationally recognized expert in free enterprise concepts, economist Dr. Scott Niederjohn, to lead the Center – including these and many other activities that synergize with the school of business, and connect us to the community and to policy-makers. It is all about making the business education you get with Concordia relevant. One of many strong supporters of these initiatives is Jim Leef and ITU Absorbtech, who are also profiled in this issue. Their donation funded a new Eagle monument to sit in front of our building, which celebrates the four North Star pillars upon which our school is based: Liberty, Faith, Economics and Truth. The monument will be unveiled at our Nov. 15th LFE Summit, which I hope you can attend. The topic is Civil Discourse in the Age of Social Media: Lessons from our search for truth during Covid; and we have nationally recognized speakers Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford physician and economist; co-author of The Great Barrington Declaration) and Jaron Lanier (Microsoft engineer; author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts; and co-inventor of virtual reality).
Last but not least, we have added new faculty and new roles to our team, who you will meet in the pages herein.
I hope you are all doing well, staying safe – living and enjoying the precious life God has graced you with. As always, please stop by to visit any time.
Yours in Christ,
Daniel Sem, PhD, MBA, JD
Dean, Batterman School of Business
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