Very Cool Immersion Program for Entreprenuerial Students

This past summer, STVP and Thammasat University in Thailand launched the REE Fellows Program to bring students together from around the world and immerse them in Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurial experience. (REE is the Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education, a series of educators conferences we conduct.) We invited REE faculty to nominate their best and brightest, and we selected 42 students from all over the world. On August 1, the students were placed on interdisciplinary, international teams and assigned two faculty mentors per team. For the next three months, the teams worked together remotely on a project in which they evaluated business opportunities related to electric vehicles.

The REE Fellows and their mentors then traveled to Stanford on Friday, October 19, to meet in person for the first time and spend a week together. While here, they toured and met with representatives from local companies, such as Google, Tesla, and IDEO; participated in intensive workshops and the REE USA conference; and prepared their final presentations, which were delivered to a panel of venture capitalists and industry experts.

It was an extraordinary experience for everyone involved, including the faculty. To a person, the students said it was a life-changing experience, and some returned home with entirely new career plans. Among the interesting, unexpected outcomes was learning to overcome the inherent challenges of a geographically dispersed project team, ranging from language and cultural issues to the selection and use of productivity tools.

Consider nominating your top students for this program next year. For more information, go to: http://ree.stanford.edu/usa/fellows.html or email Christina Harvett at charvett@stanford.edu.

If you were a REE Fellow, please chime in and tell us in your own words what the experience meant to you. Perhaps you'll inspire others to apply.

Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers: New Educators Corner Sponsor

We're pleased to welcome the esteemed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers as a STVP Educators Corner sponsor.

Recipe for Google Culture: How to Get Some of What They've Got

Here's a terrific story in Fortune about how Shona Brown, Senior Vice President, Business Operations at Google, has shaped the unique culture there. Google's culture is largely based on the bestselling business book Shona co-authored with one of her mentors, STVP Professor Kathy Eisenhardt: Competing on the Edge, Strategy as Structured Chaos.

STVP Affiliated Faculty Honored with Nobel Peace Prize

Given that one of Stanford and STVP's three core initiatives revolves around solving environmental problems, we are especially proud to announce that our very own John Weyant, STVP affiliated faculty, has been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a key member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

Sign Up to Receive Educators Corner Website Newsletters

You can now receive periodic newsletters highlighting new Educators Corner website content and pointing you to particularly interesting podcasts and video clips.

Sign up here.

Here's a sample of what one looks like.

They must be effective. Every time he sends one, we get a big pop in site traffic.

STVP Professor Bob Sutton Gains Honors

Congratulations to STVP Professor Bob Sutton, who has been named by BusinessWeek as one of the top ten all-star professors who have had an impact beyond academia.

I’ve mentioned his latest book in a previous post: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. It’s doing very well. It has hit the bestseller lists for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon.com, where it reached #1 for nonfiction.

It also just won a Quill Award for best business book published in 2007. He and other winners, such as Al Gore, will be honored at the awards ceremony in New York City on October 22.