Page 54 - BusinessWest August 7, 2023

Coming out of the pandemic, Gina Puc says, higher education was being transformed, and colleges were taking a hard look at serving students in more innovative ways.
innovative, experiential model. “We’re meeting students at this moment in time through the collaborative nature of this MBA program.”
The BIC has been an intriguing story in its own right. With the approval of more than 80 regional stakeholders in the private sec- tor, government, and academia, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center awarded the city of Pittsfield a $9.7 million capital grant in May 2014, with the goal of developing a 20,000-square-foot innova- tion center in Pittsfield’s William Stanley Business Park, the former
“An MBA student does a capstone — maybe it’s building a
“When we
saw what was happening with MCLA, we started exploring how they could be more embedded in our world and how we could serve them.”
DENNIS REBELO
>>
site of General Electric.
These days, the BIC, which officially
opened in 2020, provides regional man- ufacturers and STEM businesses with advanced research and development equipment, state-of-the-art lab and train- ing facilities, and collaboration opportu- nities with BIC’s research partners, as well as internship and apprenticeship programs for local students.
A relationship with Berkshire Coun- ty’s only four-year public college just made sense, said Dennis Rebelo, BIC’s chief learning officer.
“BIC’s three pillars are community, technology, and learning, and innovation is most likely to be robust and have a likelihood of succeeding at the interac- tion of those [pillars],” he explained, noting that such interactions can range from hyper-localizing the supply chain of building a new product to technol- ogy workshops that teach companies — from hundred-year-old firms like Crane
Currency to much newer entities like Boyd Biomedical — how tech- nology can be a tranformative agent in ways they might not have considered.
“There are different ways technology can be a catalyst in eco- nomic growth and development,” he said. “When we saw what was happening with MCLA, we started exploring how they could be more embedded in our world and how we could serve them. It made sense to host their MBA program as partners; we’re now referring to it as an innovation-based MBA.
new product, like an advanced car seat, maybe a therapeutic
MCLA
Continued on page 56
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