Abstract
The rapid pace of innovation in new media (content and distribution), wireless sensors, and mobile lifestyles has led to unprecedented advances across a range of sectors. In the healthcare sector, these advances have been profound in both the clinical and consumer settings. While diffusion of these technologies has been rapid, it has occurred in the context of (1) a global financial crisis and its aftermath and (2) through a range of vehicles from start-ups to large organizations. The longstanding lack of exposure to operating companies and financial economics is leaving many engineering graduates unprepared to build on this foundation or carry increasingly broad early-career responsibilities. Because entrepreneurship must occur in large organizations as well as start-ups, the traditional safe track of applying routine skills in large companies is often not available. With only a few exceptions, universities have left students, and innovative faculty, with options that have been perfunctory at best: most often in the form of an “entrepreneurship” course devoid of real world cases, or worse, hundreds of so-called “incubators” that add up to nothing compared to the resources they consume. We have been involved in a number of interdisciplinary technology, economic, and policy issues (see below biography) and regularly involve students who gain hands-on experience in these projects. This presentation will cover 3-4 case studies illustrating compelling and developing innovations, with the purpose of stimulating ideas and discussion with an institution (ICL) widely recognized for pioneering solutions to the education deficits described above.
Biography
Edward G. Cape, Ph.D. is the Managing Partner and Founder of The Sapphire Group LLC, a holding company in New York City with assets in healthcare, new media, energy, education and security. The firm also maintains a generalist restructuring/turnaround practice. Prior to starting The Sapphire Group more than twelve years ago, Cape was an Investment Banker at UBS Warburg (healthcare financing and mergers & acquisitions); prior to UBS Warburg, was Founding Director of the Cardiac Dynamics Laboratory at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, holding appointments in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, and Medicine (Pediatric Cardiology); was a consultant for numerous companies (large-cap down to start-ups). During his academic period he published over 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals, seven textbook chapters, over 100 conference abstracts, and a Harvard Business School Teaching Case on Disruptive Technologies; won the Young Investigator of the Year Award of the American Society of Echocardiography; conducted research-in-residence on cross-border technology diffusion in the global economics division of Merrill Lynch; and chemical engineering unit operations at University College London. Cape has B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering, with a minor in applied probability and industrial statistics, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.
Cape’s current management of Sapphire’s portfolio is typically executed via board seats, interim executive positions and, when necessary, shareholder rights actions. His primary interests are: corporate governance, economic development, monetary policy, energy, and foreign affairs. He has served on public and private boards, chaired and restructured one public audit committee, and served in officer roles during turnaround operations. He recently expanded media activity adding: Sapphire Film Productions, implementing a proprietary economic model for distributing documentary/specialty films, with first festival screening in 2013:, and Sapphire New Media, participating in the current evolution of traditional media (print, television and film) to mobile technologies applied to home/business/security. The latter stems from accumulating interfaces between miniature devices and remote monitoring, with attention to increasingly sharp socioeconomic disparities.
Cape is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics, American Economic Association, Turnaround Management Association, American Bankruptcy Institute, Society of Labor Economists, the Detroit Economic Club, The New York Academy of Sciences, American Finance Association, Eastern Economic Association, HBS Club of New York, served as Vice President/Trustee of The Chemists’ Club, founded in NYC in 1898, and has been selected for a series of senior Task Force/Working Groups over the years such as the NATO Advanced Science Institute. He is on the editorial board of international journals and since leaving full-time academia 16 years ago, Cape has continued as an active speaker and practitioner in education, with emphasis on managing innovation, economics & trade, and competition & strategy. Activities include Advisory Board at Georgia Tech; teaches a graduate elective on Financial Economics and Entrepreneurship at the City College, CUNY (Adjunct Professor of the Year (2010)); an annual short course as visiting professor at Penn State; obtained NSF grant as business mentor with Memorial Sloan Kettering (2013); and designed a course on energy efficiency with a realistic need for a competitive oil and gas sector. In the non-profit arena, he is President, Alzheimer’s Action Foundation, is Chairman of the Sustainable Business Board, Global Autism Project, with operations in NYC, Ghana, West Africa and Northern India. Cape has participated in the now-fashionable “economic development” area for a decade with current focus on Michigan, Florida, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. He has traveled through South Asia, and on multiple delegations to China: senior advisor for a technology product launch, three week invited lecture tour of major hospitals, and optimizing export and distribution planning for medical imaging equipment.
At present, Cape’s central work is primarily focused on: the co-dependence of financial institutions and real economy sectors, post-crisis – contributing to both private sector restructuring and academic economics, examining the transmission and amplification channels between monetary policy and sector-specific components of GDP, inflation and unemployment; and highly interdisciplinary topics such as the complex oil and gas issues in post-Soviet Russia and China. He also builds upon two decades working on behalf of under-represented groups in the job market and certain privileged education tracks, facilitating paths for women, minorities, and any excluded or disadvantaged group in a range of inappropriately exclusive domains; has funded scholarships in three states; and is involved in work to address the disproportionate representation of Veterans in the homeless and unemployed populations, and their experience with rapidly emerging healthcare problems such as PTSD and TBI.