Interview with Judge Business School Dean Christoph Loch

Loch is putting Judge Business School’s money where his mouth is.  For each of the last two years, Judge has put £200,000 into Accelerate Cambridge, a business incubator started in May 2012 that has already helped launch 50 startups including six that have collectively raised more than £3 million in seed money. Unlike many business schools, Judge does not take an ownership stake in the startups it helps launch, preferring instead to rely on successful companies to “pay it forward” and give back voluntarily. Through the Centre for Social Innovation, Judge has also helped support a University of Cambridge-based program called Social Incubator East, which will incubate 50 social enterprises over the next two years, including a company that helps create successful job share partnerships and an enterprise that aims to secure DNA data that can help diagnose and treat genetic diseases.

The money is no small thing for Judge, which is in the middle of a capital campaign to finance construction of a new business school building. Loch says he hopes construction can begin in late 2015, with the new building opening in 2017. But so far the school has only about 30% of the money it needs – courtesy of the Monument Trust, established by the late British businessman Simon Sainsbury, the same organization whose 1991 founding gift helped establish Judge. Some of the remaining 70% will come from Judge funds, but additional donors are needed.

“Philanthropy plays a crucial role,” Loch says. “We have a donor for part of this, but we are desperately looking for more donors.”

Judge, as its web site says, is “bursting at the seams,” with 30% of degree program lectures and 65% of executive education courses taking place in other locations throughout Cambridge. A third of Judge’s 60 faculty, as well as 30 staff members, have offices in buildings not located on the business school campus. Phase one of the expansion, which will cost £34 million, will allow Judge to bring those activities under one roof.

Loch has no plans to expand enrollment in Judge’s full-time MBA program, which now has 145 students. But he says he’d like to grow its executive education program, which now generates about £12 million a year, by 50% in five years, and the new building will help him do that.

But clearly one of Loch’s top priorities right now is research, and the focus of that research is Silicon Fen, the cluster of over 1,600 high-tech companies in and around Cambridge. That means supporting faculty research through the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning into entrepreneurial “clusters” like Cambridge and what makes them develop. But it also means sending MBA students out to consult with startups in the area as part of a team project at the end of the first term.

“We want to be a research-based institution working on solving real problems out in the real world,” he says. “What we’re doing in entrepreneurship is an example of how we’re doing that.”

In his first blog post since taking over at Judge, Loch described what he hoped to accomplish as an “evolution…rather than a revolution.” But as any good history professor will tell you, revolutions don’t always announce themselves with guns blazing. The changes at Judge, by quietly mapping the innovation genome in its own backyard and immersing MBA students deeply in it, might turn out to be so!