Hawai‘i Pacific University named Amy Nguyen-Chyung dean of its College of Business late last year.
She came to HPU from the University of California San Diego, where Nguyen-Chyung says she was "focusing a lot on the innovation ecosystem there, really bringing new venture skills to the MBAs I was teaching, but also to the campus — really linking, reaching across campus to help launch ventures, to bring entrepreneurial skills."
Nguyen-Chyung started at HPU last month, but recently told Aloha State Daily that she has been working with university leaders since December.
As she settles into her new role, HPU also is working to support innovation and entrepreneurship across the campus thanks in part to a recent $700,000 gift from philanthropist and entrepreneur John Scarpa.
The new John F. Scarpa Entrepreneurial Pathway, which formally launches this fall, "brings together a suite of interconnected programs to engage HPU students and faculty members," the university said in a July announcement. "Key components include competitive student challenges, faculty innovation grants, an entrepreneurial pathway board and an entrepreneur-in-residence program, all crafted to infuse entrepreneurial thinking across the university community."
Nguyen-Chyung says the university-wide initiative will be led from the College of Business, but essentially will involve "the entire school across disciplines."
The initiative's major programs include a Faculty Change Makers program, which will provide grants to faculty in the university's different colleges "to create courses and programming that will provide hands-on opportunities [for] entrepreneurial thinking, "she explained.
"The idea is to engage faculty from different areas because then they can be the champions across the school to create innovative coursework."
The pathway also calls for an Entrepreneurs in Residence program to provide mentoring, talks and other workshops, she said, while the third component is a series of challenges and competitions that aim to excite and engage students in entrepreneurial education.
Nguyen-Chyung says the $700,000 gift is seed funding, and the idea is that some parts of the program will be able to be self-sustaining while other parts will rely on further sponsorships from community and business partners.
"We see that a lot of parts can continue from the work that we initially start," she explained. "Not all of it is needing funds. A lot of it is building the relationships with community partners that will engage to provide projects for the students, to provide mentorship, internships."
Scarpa, who co-founded the American Cellular Network Corp. and UNITEL, said in the announcement that he's providing this funding with "tremendous enthusiasm and joy."
"It is critical that our educational institutions move forward with vision and opportunity and innovation so that our youth today are prepared to take on the challenges of tomorrow’s world," he continued. "I am excited to see how transformative this Entrepreneurial Pathway can be for both students and faculty.”
You can read more about the Entrepreneurial Pathway here.
Nguyen-Chyung received an undergraduate degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University, a joint MBA and MPA, or master of public administration, from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs, and master's degree and doctorate in business administration from UC Berkeley's Haas School.
She's been in academia for 18 years and has about 15 years of industry experience that spans investment banking, international finance and management consulting, "a lot of the areas where business students want to be," as well as some work in the government sector.
"I think a lot of hard problems out there are solved by collaborations across industry and government and education, as well," Nguyen-Chyung says. "I think it's at the intersection of things where we find the best solutions."
Here's some more of what Nguyen-Chyung had to say about her new role, entrepreneurship in Hawai‘i and the new entrepreneurial pathway.
What is your top priority now and your ultimate goal in this role?
It's hard to limit it to one thing because the dean's job is really to lead the entire [College] of Business here and there's a lot of different programs and things that make the school what it is.
Certainly, this [Entrepreneurial Pathway] initiative is a major goal because it reaches beyond the school. But the business school itself, the College of Business, it's in a rebuilding phase. I understand it was actually one of the largest colleges on campus, and now it's one of the smallest, right? So there's a lot of opportunity to strengthen our core. I was just explaining it recently that there's a lot of new initiatives going on. I love that the university is behaving like a 60-year-old start-up.
... In some ways, though — I tell this to the startups, that if you try to do everything, you can't do everything well. You've got to pick and choose. When we have lean resources, I would like to, first and foremost, strengthen our core program, the MBA and the undergraduate program, and I also want to understand the communities that we serve. [I]want to make sure that we are meeting the needs of that community.
My first few weeks have been to really try to reach out and understand these communities, one by one.
Can you talk a little bit about the role of young entrepreneurship and business startups in Hawai‘i? What role do college students in these programs play in the state's overall economy?
There are not a lot of major headquarters of industry that we see here, so there's a great big opportunity to innovate, to start new things. There are a lot of small businesses and they're very entrepreneurial. There [are] also opportunities to introduce students to higher-growth entrepreneurship opportunities, which can help propel industries. I, myself, am an entrepreneurship scholar, and really being aware of the literature and the research, it's the new businesses that drive jobs. It's not necessarily big companies or even small businesses, it's new businesses. It's startups that drive jobs. If we can generate more of those, I think that would be great.
What is the next step in the Entrepreneurial Pathway program?
One of the big targets is to catch the students early on, when they start. So I've been meeting with many of the campus leaders to build pilots for the first-year class and inserting an entrepreneurial education component into some of the existing orientations and new student courses that we have.
For example, in our University 1000 course, we have sessions introducing students to 'aloha,' 'pono,' and 'kuleana,' and so we're hoping to use that session to introduce the students to a community problem, either social [or] environmental, and engage a community organization, and have the students start problem-solving in teams, but in the process to give them some of the tools [to] kind of whet their appetite with some of these entrepreneurial tools.
We have a few other pilots planned and really, it's using the entrepreneurial process to implement the program. ... We've already identified several dozen metrics that we want to track and make sure that we're having the impact that we hope and we then scale up across all the students.
What is your biggest hope for the new entrepreneurial pathway?
My biggest hope is that we impact and benefit not just the students but also the community, so that we prepare the students well for the future, and also by doing so, and in the process of doing so, benefit our neighborhood, but also across the Islands.
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Stephanie Salmons can be reached at stephanie@alohastatedaily.com.
