Institute Management

Dr. Joseph C. Picken

Executive Director

Dr. Joseph Picken has been a member of the faculty of the School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas since 2001. He serves as the executive director of the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UT Dallas and teaches graduate courses in entrepreneurship, leadership, strategic management and organizational behavior. Over the past six years, Picken and his colleagues have built a leading academic program in innovation and entrepreneurship with more than 750 students currently enrolled in 14 graduate and undergraduate courses.

Picken holds an A.B. in Economics from Dartmouth College, an MBA in Finance and Accounting from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Texas at Arlington. He is a member of the Beta Gamma Sigma academic honorary society. From 1997-2000, he was a visiting assistant professor and senior lecturer in organizational behavior/business policy at the Edwin L. Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. From 1995-1997, Dr. Picken taught in the MBA program at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author with Gregory Dess of two books, Mission Critical: The Seven Strategic Traps that Derail Even the Smartest Companies (Irwin/McGraw Hill, 1997) and Beyond Productivity: How Leading Companies Achieve Superior Performance by Leveraging Their Human Capital (AMACOM Books, 1999). He has published numerous articles in trade and professional journals.

Picken's business and consulting career spans more than 30 years. He has served as CFO of major operating units of several Fortune 500 corporations, held CEO or COO positions in two NASDAQ companies and has been involved in two initial public offerings and several successful turnarounds. His industry experience includes electronics and heavy equipment manufacturing, transportation, aviation services, equipment leasing, computer hardware/software and government contracting.

He has also headed his own management consulting firm since 1986. Joseph C. Picken and Associates provides strategy, marketing, operations management and turnaround management consulting services to firms across a broad range of manufacturing and service industries. The firm focuses primarily on the unique challenges of emerging growth firms in high technology industries. Over the past 21 years, the firm has successfully completed more than 80 consulting engagements for more than 60 clients.

 

Robert L. Robb

Associate Vice President for Technology Commercialization

Director, Venture Development

Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UT Dallas

Senior Lecturer  Entrepreneurship MBA Program, UTD School of Management

Robert L. Robb is the Associate Vice President for Technology Commercialization at UT Dallas, Director of Venture Development for The Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at UTD (IIE) and a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship in the School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas.  Mr. Robb heads the new Office of Technology Commercialization and leads the “virtual incubation” initiative at UTD and is an investor in or advisor to several early stage enterprises.  Mr. Robb’s perspective of new venture development is that of entrepreneur, venture investor and institutional venture developer with over 27 years experience in creating, managing and advising emerging enterprises.  He has funded, founded, nurtured and/or managed 24 early stage companies and served as CEO of 7 emerging enterprises.  Seven of the 24 companies Mr. Robb assisted or managed have established a combined market capitalization in excess of $1.3 billion with several of these enterprises being acquired by larger firms.  He has coached entrepreneurs and advised early stage companies in all facets of creating and managing new ventures and has raised more than $80 million for start-up and early stage companies.  

Mr. Robb’s experience includes 6 years as a venture investor with two, seed-stage, venture capital firms, including a public venture fund, which he founded.  Also, he served as Director of the Technology Management Office at the University of Michigan with responsibility to reorganize and rebrand the TMO and proactively commercialize Michigan’s innovations through the creation of new ventures.   Additionally, Mr. Robb served as Executive Director of Venture Development for BCM Technologies, Inc., the technology commercialization arm of Baylor College of Medicine, where he facilitated the launch of new enterprises founded on BCM’s new inventions.

He currently serves as an advisor or consultant to several early stage companies, including, Aqua-Synergy, Catawater Enterprises, BioSig ID, MicroTransponder, Solarno, Pungo, Inc., and North Texas Enterprise Center, a business accelerator.

Mr. Robb received a B.S. in Environmental Biology and a M.S. in Parasitology/Microbiology from the University of Utah.

 

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Dr. Andrew J. Blanchard

Associate Director

Dr. Andrew J. Blanchard is the senior associate dean and director of operations and financial affairs for the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. Blanchard received a B.S. degree from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, an M.S. degree from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University.

Prior to joining UT Dallas, Blanchard was employed in academia, worked in industry and was a consultant to government and industry where he managed multi-million dollar programs. He has held full professorships with the Department of Electrical Engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and The University of Texas at Arlington.

His areas of technical specialization include mathematical modeling of electromagnetic phenomena; RF systems theory and design, radar system and antenna analysis; radar cross section theory and measurements, tomographic imaging (microwave, optical and acoustic), and electro-optical system design and modeling. Blanchard is a member of The Electromagnetics Society, URSI Commission F, IEEE Geoscience Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) and member of the GRS Society Fellow Evaluation Committee. He is affiliated with AGU, Phi Kappa Phi, Eta Kappa Nu, ASEE and Tau Beta Pi. In 1986, he received the Eta Kappa Nu MacDonald Award as the "Outstanding Electrical Engineering Professor in the United States of America."

 

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Donald A. Hicks Ph.D.

Executive Committee

Dr. Donald A. Hicks is a professor of political economy and public policy in UT Dallas' School of Economic, Social and Political Sciences. He also serves as special assistant to UT Dallas President Dr. David E. Daniel. His research and consulting activities have been focused on technology innovation and processes of emerging technologies and industries. Current research includes studies on prospects for anticipating demand for ultra-precision nano-scale production; designer materials and toolsets; the role of venture capital investment in regional/industrial transformation; value creation in bioscience commercialization; the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in healthcare service transformation; and time-to-market competitive pressures on product innovation and industry change. Hicks joined the UT Dallas faculty in 1975.

 

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Rafael Martin

          

Executive Committee

 

Rafael Martin is the Associate Vice President for Research in UT Dallas' Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. He has responsibilities across the range of university research processes. On the front end, he assists researchers with non-disclosure and other agreements that facilitate building relationships with potential corporate sponsors. Once a mutual research interest is identified, he negotiates the contracts which formalize the relationship between the university and sponsor. On the tail end of the process, Martin receives intellectual property disclosures from researchers and shepherds them through the university's evaluation and protection process. He then works to find licensing partners or investors for university owned technologies.

Born and raised in Dallas, Martin received a B.A. in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After graduation, he took a job as a consultant with McKinsey & Company working in the Dallas and Toronto offices. After three years as a consultant, he decided to switch careers and became a paramedic, eventually becoming a field training officer for Durham County EMS in Durham, N.C. While working as a paramedic, Martin received a M.S. in Environmental Management from Duke University and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a graduate student, he worked for The Home Depot in Atlanta and Ford Motor Company in Chennai, India. In 2003, Martin joined UT Dallas as the university's manager for technology transfer, eventually becoming director of the Office of Research Administration. In 2005, he did business development and operations consulting work for Jonathan Bailey Associates, an architecture firm serving the healthcare and education sectors. A few months later, he returned to UT Dallas to his current position.

 

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DJ Yang, Ph.D.

Executive Committee

Before joining UT Dallas as Associate Dean in UT Dallas' School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in 2003, Dr. DJ Yang was in charge of leading nano-bio business development at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) as an executive vice president.

SAIT is the central research and development organization in Samsung Electronics. Between 1997-99, he was the head of the chemical sector and vice president at the institute, and in 2000, he was promoted to executive vice president. Prior to working at Samsung, Yang worked at Dupont-U.S.A. and Dupont-Korea, holding various positions such as researcher, group leader, project manager and research and development, managing director.

While at Dupont, he received various experiences through working in the several positions in research and development, manufacturing, supply chain, project/product management and sales/marketing at Polymer Intermediates Dept., Finishes/Fabricated Products Dept., Automotive Products SBU and Electronics Materials SBU. He was an Adjunct Professor at the Center for Surface Science and Engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia between 1989-93. He was also a founding member of the Delaware Korean School and served as managing principle.

 

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