By Francesca Di Meglio

Disadvantaged women who seek support and training from Women's Business Centers are fairly successful, according to the findings of a study recently released by The Center for Women's Leadership at Babson College in Massachusetts.

The Association of Women's Business Centers, which is headquartered in Camden, Me., but oversees 125 Women's Business Centers across the country, commissioned the study to find out if hard data matched the group's anecdotal evidence of success.

The AWBC discovered that the majority of its clients have a modest education and household incomes of less than $50,000. But about 60% of the clientele, which includes women and a small percentage of men, are actively managing a business venture. "This study creates a strong, economic argument for the centers," says Ann Marie Almeida, president of the association.

Nan Langowitz, who was among the principal researchers conducting the study and is director of the Center for Women's Leadership at Babson, says women who have a positive experience in creating a small business with help from the centers might seek more formal education. It's safe to say that B-schools, notoriously in need of more girl power on campus, certainly hope so.

---

New Deans At Georgetown, Colorado

The Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and the Leeds School of Businessat the University of Colorado at Boulder recently announced the appointments of new deans.

George Daly will take the reins at Georgetown, and Dennis Ahlburg will head the Leeds School. Both are career academics who are experienced in administration.

Daly, who will start at McDonough in the fall, says his first priority is to learn as much as he can about the school. He recently had dinner with student leaders and plans to meet the entire faculty and administration in the coming weeks. This will give him a chance to assess the school's strengths and weaknesses before deciding how to take action, says Daly. "The school hasn't reached its full potential, and I would like to be the one who gets it there," he adds.

Serving as dean at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University from 1993 to 2002, Daly helped bring in $150 million, one of the most ambitious fund-raising campaigns in the school's history. In recent years, he served as the Albert Fingerhut professor of business administration at Stern. Before arriving at NYU, Daly had been dean at the College of Business Administration at the University of Iowa and the College of Social Sciences at the University of Houston. In 1974, he was the chief economist in the Office of Energy Research & Development at the Nixon White House.

Search committee members say Daly won the job because of his leadership experience and his ability to understand the McDonough school's unique challenges. "We felt the school had made lots of progress by opening new programs, enhancing research, and rising in the rankings," says Paul Almeida, a search-committee member and associate professor of strategy and international business. "But we needed a new dean to take us to a new level."

Daly's to-do list likely will include keeping an eye on career services -- which recently faced a rocky period with much turnover -- and helping the McDonough School leverage its D.C. location for government-minded B-school students. "We think the school is poised to solidify its national reputation and break some new ground," says Georgetown University Provost James O'Donnell, who headed the dean search committee.

Like the McDonough school, Leeds chose someone with a proven track record in academia. For the last 25 years, Ahlburg has been at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Most recently, he was the senior associate dean and took responsibility for faculty and research issues, the budget, human resources, executive education, and teaching excellence initiatives.

Having already worked to raise funds for a public institution, Ahlburg was the right man for the job, says William Kaempfer, vice-provost for budget and planning at Colorado. He added that Ahlburg's experience working at a school with programs for undergraduate, graduate, and PhD candidates will help him hit the ground running when he starts in August, after the university's board of regents approves his appointment.

Ahlburg, a native of Australia who came to the U.S. to go to graduate school, earned his PhD in economics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. "I chose [to work in] public higher education because it's where kids like me get their start, and I want to give opportunities to others," he says. One of his main goals is to have Leeds develop a relationship with the engineering school and other parts of the university. After all, isn't making connections what B-school is all about?

---

Columbia Makes It Case Online

Columbia Business School in New York recently -- and unintentionally -- responded to critics who say B-school research is irrelevant to the real world by launching an online publication for practitioners.

A year in the making, Columbia Ideas at Work is a portal that showcases the intellectual capital of the school's researchers and displays it in a way that's easy to understand and palatable even for nonacademics. The purpose is to show how the research CBS professors conduct applies to the average businessperson's workplace, say administrators.

"Our objective is to create greater visibility of faculty members and to present their work in a way that's useful," says Paul Glasserman, senior vice-dean at CBS. The research covers everything from motivating employees to making strategic investment choices. The portal includes research briefs that link findings into practical applications, a searchable research archive of faculty publications, and an online magazine with articles, research summaries, and faculty interviews.

Each issue will revolve around a theme, starting with the inaugural one on entrepreneurship, which is now available. Articles on the impact of a founder's departure from a company, pricing risks in venture capital, and a Q&A with Dean Glenn Hubbard are among the notable features in the first issue. Content will be updated quarterly, and future issues will focus on risk management and emerging markets. Evidently, the overriding theme is providing proof that business education is still worthy.