Extending innovation is focus of UC Davis-Mars collaboration
An opinion piece by Harold Schmitz, the chief scientist at Mars Inc., and a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Management at UC Davis, appeared in The Sacramento Bee on April 4, 2015. Here’s an excerpt:
Amid all the headline-grabbing talk about the value of public higher education, about taxpayer support for education or the lack of it, about what’s in it for us and why we should care, there’s a pie-in-the-sky word – innovation – that needs some grounding in the here and now.
I’m the chief scientist of Mars Inc. – a diverse global food company headquartered near Washington, D.C. Where my colleagues and I have established ourselves, however, is on the University of California’s Davis campus.
Why did Mars choose UC Davis above all other universities in the world? Because this public powerhouse is the best place to discover ways to improve the health of all three of our primary consumers: people, dogs and cats. It’s home to the world’s best agricultural school and ideally positioned to find ways to create sustainable supply chains for our key raw materials, including cacao, corn, peanuts, tomatoes and rice.
UC Davis’ expertise in management, economics, law, engineering and many other areas is vital for companies such as Mars to innovate successfully. And being connected to the larger University of California system with its vast array of faculty expertise and graduate talent is critical to innovation in industry. Being in Davis also places us next to the world’s leading innovation cluster in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, which faces the emerging markets of Asia.
Schmitz reinforced the importance of funding higher education:
We all need to play a role in this crucial mission. If we make the terrible mistake of starving our public universities today – of talent, of helpful outside partners, of the necessary financial resources – we might literally starve future generations.
Read the full article on the Sacramento Bee website.