Gift endows new institute for innovation management

The Mack Center is back with some changes this school year—including a new name.

William L. and Phyllis Mack have presented the Wharton School a major gift to permanently endow the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. The Institute was formerly the William and Phyllis Mack Center for Technological Innovation and was established by the Macks in 2001.

The mission of the Mack Institute is to provide a community dedicated to studying the intersection of business, science and technology, connecting researchers, business leaders and students in order to collect and disseminate knowledge in innovation management.

The change in name comes from University policy, which allows centers to become institutes once they reach a certain level of endowment, according to new Executive Director of the Mack Institute Saikat Chaudhuri.

“We have an expanded mandate now,” Chaudhuri said. “We will look to be more involved with innovation across campus.”

This includes expanding to work with the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Perelman School of Medicine.

Some of the Mack Institute’s current projects include sponsoring multiple venture competitions, such as the Y-Prize Competition and iGEM, a synthetic biology competition in which over 200 teams participated in 2013.

“Wharton is honored to have Bill and Phyllis Mack as partners in advancing innovation management research and education at the School,” Wharton Dean Thomas Robertson said in a statement released by the school.

Chaudhuri and other leaders of the Mack Institute, including several Wharton faculty, are still in the process of defining the institute’s new goals and projects. Ideas currently on the table include several conferences for partner organizations, including Nissan, FedEx and Hertz, a workshop on online education and global expansions of current venture competitions.

“I think this is an opportunity for us to really promote innovation — creating and managing innovation in an even more powerful way than in the past,” Chaudhuri said.

This article has been updated to reflect that not all teams in the iGem competition were from Penn.

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