All The New Faculty At The Top U.S. Business Schools In 2022

Jane Wu

Assistant Professor of Strategy at UCLA Anderson

“Entrepreneurship is one of those types of things that I think a lot of what you get out of is doing things in the market, trying something yourself to bring an idea into fruition.”

Jane Wu conducts research at the intersection of innovation, entrepreneurship and strategy. Her current work focuses on the role of metrics in shaping firm innovation. She also studies the entrepreneurial strategy choices that high-growth startup founders encounter.

She received her PhD in Management from MIT. Before graduate school, she co-founded an education software startup, worked in venture capital in Toronto and Boston, and conducted research at the Harvard Business School Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness.

Poets&Quants: Are you teaching this quarter?

Jane Wu: I’m not teaching in the fall quarter. I teach in the following quarter, so I’ll start in January, and I’ll be teaching Entrepreneurship and New Venture Initiations, a course that I’m really excited about. It’s an elective and I’m taking it over from Olav Sorenson who’s a great professor. So some big shoes to fill.

Can you give us a sneak preview of what the course will be like?

It’s going to be a mixture of lectures and guest lectures and case studies. Entrepreneurship is one of those types of things that I think a lot of what you get out of is doing things in the market, trying something yourself to bring an idea into fruition. So the students are going to be paired up into teams. They self-sort, and then they’ll be actively working on applying course concepts to pilot, whether it’s a side hustle or a startup idea, or just something that they’re doing for the class, we’re going to have them work through the steps. So a mixture of in-class and action learning, if you will.

This is right in line with your work, with your research, isn’t it?

Yeah, I’m really passionate about understanding more about this area, of how people can actually take an idea and make a business out of it. It’s a really hard process and contains a lot of nuance. There is a lot of uncertainty that you face.

You’re in a great place for entrepreneurship, the West Coast.

Yeah, definitely very excited about it. I’m really excited to be at UCLA and as an innovation scholar, L.A. is also such a great place for that. You’ve got not only entertainment and aerospace and bioscience and all those things, but I think with some new technology trends like VR, blockchain, or food tech, just a lot of momentum going on. So I’m excited to be here to learn more and hopefully be up to study some of these sectors as well.

What about UCLA was most appealing to you?

I have been really fortunate and had the extraordinary opportunity to meet fantastic scholars all over the country and also abroad in Canada in the UK. For myself, I think the group at UCLA is again, really thoughtful, really smart. As I mentioned earlier, being in the L.A. ecosystem is just a really bright place for me to be able to learn that I haven’t really been exposed to yet, having spent almost a decade on the East Coast.