Faculty News & Research UC Davis’ Energy Efficiency Center Makes Conservation Sexy “Professor Andrew Hargadon believes energy efficiency can be sexy— and he’s winning fans at Chevron, Samsung, and Wal-Mart, and in Silicon Valley.” —Fast Company, May 2009
Associate Professor Andrew Hargadon
Associate Professor Andrew Hargadon, the founding director of the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center (EEC), was featured in the May issue of Fast Company in an article titled “UC Davis’ Energy Efficiency Center Makes Conservation Sexy.” The article recognized Hargadon’s leadership at the forefront of the energy efficiency wave by fostering networks linking entrepreneurs, scientists, venture capitalists and business students. Building these connections is at the core of Hargadon’s work to help push innovations out of the lab and into the market. “In the course of an afternoon…,” Hargadon told Fast Company, “we’ve been able to introduce entrepreneurs and their VCs to three different utilities and immediately begin talking about pilot programs.” Fast Company spotlighted recent EEC fellows and their innovations, including Siva Gunda, a UC Davis Ph.D. candidate in
mechanical engineering who teamed up with MBA students on two start-ups that were also finalists in last year’s Big Bang! Business Plan Competition: CEDR, a low-cost demand-response system for electric grids; and WicKool, a retrofit device that improves the performance of rooftop air conditioners by recycling condensation. The story also described how Hargadon is plugging venture capitalists into the network to fund promising energy efficiency technologies. Hargadon introduced Raju Pandey, a computer-science professor at UC Davis, to Barbara Grant, managing director of American River Ventures, a Sacramento-area venture capital firm focused on efficiency. Grant agreed to invest in Pandey’s wireless monitoring technology that cuts cooling costs by targeting air conditioning and fans at server racks rather than blast-chilling an entire data center. Pandey’s company, SynapSense, has since attracted $20 million in venture capital. “Andy is absolutely the linchpin of why this works,” Grant told Fast Company. “It’s not only vital and vibrant, it’s almost viral.” Hargadon, who also serves as faculty director of the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship, will be promoted to full professor on July 1.
Pioneering Marketing Research Earns Prestigious AMA Nomination
Professor Prasad Naik In their research, Naik and Raman developed a new method that enables marketing managers to quantify the magnitude of synergy using readily available market data.
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Professor Prasad Naik was one of the top five finalists for the prestigious 2008 William F. O’Dell Award, for his pioneering research on the role of synergy in integrating marketing communications. The American Marketing Association awards the honor for articles published in the Journal of Marketing Research over the last five years. The articles are judged by the editorial board as making the “most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice.” Naik and his co-author, Professor Kalyan Raman of Northwestern University, were nominated for their article, “Understanding the Impact of Synergy in Multimedia Communication.” In their research, Naik and Raman developed a new method that enables marketing managers to quantify the magnitude of synergy using
readily available market data. The authors also established new marketing principles: first, in the presence of synergy, managers should increase the total marketing budget and allocate a larger portion of the incremental budget to the less effective marketing activity; second, because synergies induce catalytic effects, managers should spend even on ineffective marketing activities that exhibit synergies with other effective activities. Naik has presented these novel findings to senior managers from major multinational companies at the Marketing Science Institute’s Metrics Conference in Boston, Mass., and at the New Media Landscape Conference in Barcelona, Spain.