Master Networker -Research Excellence
By Meg Torbert
April 4, 2007
© Lisa Nugent, Excellence in Research, Professor of Decision Sciences, Whittemore School of Business and Economics
Last June during the World Cup playoffs, fans of the Brazilian team packed
shoulder to shoulder in German stadiums and crowded around TV sets worldwide
to see if their team of soccer demigods, billed as the best, would rise
to the occasion.
But A.R. “Venky” Venkatachalam, professor of information systems,
was more interested in catching a televised glimpse of the Brazilian coach. “I
always try to learn from him,” Venkatachalam says of Carlos Parreira,
known as a master tactician and an expert in managing people. “He
has the same problem as high-tech companies: How do you manage superstars
making $30 million? It’s the same with many global companies where
the design team is in London, manufacturing is in China, management is
in the United States, and they’re all hotshots. How do you make them
collaborate?”
It’s not the first time that Venkatachalam has drawn a connection
between seemingly unrelated subjects. In 1995, Bill Wetzel, now professor
emeritus of business administration, invited him to listen in on a meeting
of U.S. Small Business Administration officials. The subject was how to
create a national network that would help small businesses get access to
venture capital.
As he listened, Venkatachalam thought of the Internet, which was then
an e-mail tool for academics. He had just installed an early—and
ornery—browser, Mosaic, and despite his exasperation, he sensed the
possibilities. “I told them, ‘Perhaps this new network of computers
could be used,’” he recalls.
The resulting system, ACE-Net (Angel Capital Electronic Network), built
with UNH’s Research Computing Center (RCC), is in use today in 45
states. It was the first of a string of innovative projects with a common
theme: take complex subjects with massive amounts of data and figure out
ways for people to access that information in a useful way.
Two years later, the U.S. Small Business Administration, having spent
$10 million in an unsuccessful attempt to build a procurement network,
turned to Venkatachalam. For less than $150,000, he designed and built—again
with RCC—the Internet-based PRO-Net system that lets users look for
businesses that have been approved to work for the government. In June
1997, at a White House ceremony, Vice President Al Gore congratulated Venkatachalam
for his work.
A native of India, Venkatachalam earned his undergraduate degree in mechanical
engineering. His graduate degrees—an M.B.A. and Ph.D.—are in
business management. Patrick Messer, RCC’s associate director, admires
Venkatachalam’s ability to bridge the normally dissimilar fields
of business and information technology. “He’ll come to us and
ask, ‘Can we do this?’ And if I explain why it can’t
be done a certain way, he’ll think for a while, and then he’ll
say, ‘OK, can we do it this way?’
“Once he asked me a question and went away and thought about it
for a year,” says Messer. “And when I heard from him again,
he had come up with a solution.”
Like pots simmering on a busy stove, Venkatachalam’s research projects
coexist with his teaching load, department chair duties, publications,
and editorial responsibilities. Recently, to give some structure to his
far-flung interests, Venkatachalam created the Enterprise Integration Research
Center, where his newest venture is percolating.
The project, currently a pilot involving several New England states, would
help high-tech companies get funding for intellectual property, including
patents, trademarks, and copyrights. He can’t say very much, he notes
apologetically: the University is looking into patenting the concept and
possibly launching a spin-off.
In March, Venkatachalam received $990,000 for the project—the largest
grant in the Whittemore School’s history—from the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office. If a patent is granted and he is given the go-ahead
to build a nationwide network, he may find himself in the pleasant, if
ironic, position of watching investors use his patented system to assess
the economic potential of his system’s patented idea.
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