Dr. Nikhil Varaiya, the famed entrepreneurship professor from San Diego State University, made an appearance at UNB last week as part of the International Business and Entrepreneurship Centre's Visiting Scholar's Series.
Chairman of the Department of Finance of San Diego State's College of Business Administration, Varaiya has won numerous awards for his research into corporate finance and was at UNB to present a lecture entitled 'Teaching Entrepreneurial Finance.'
Focusing on such topics as Credit Unions, Venture Capitalists, and Evolution of Startups, Varayia spoke for over two hours on the various areas of entrepreneurial finance. This included the information that out of 1000 new companies, only seven to twenty will go on to become a long-term public corporation.
Varaiya was also a guest speaker in two of the Faculty's classes, including a fourth-year Competitive Strategy class. He presented his Strategic Value Based Management Framework, which tries to capture the major decisions and aspects that are relevant to managers engaged in strategic decision making. Other strategic management tools, such as Strategy Maps, also try to do this, but Varaiya’s framework has a much stronger integration with the financial components of strategy.
The course's professor, Dr. Martin Wielemaker, stated that “Varaiya’s framework enabled the students to easily interrelate all the important aspects of the Capstone business simulation that they had competed in over the past months.”