SparkTalks featuring UIC Business Faculty

Presentation title: Teaching students how to use the Swiss Army Knife of the business world

Abstract: When I first arrived at UIC, I wanted to provide my students in my Introduction to Finance course with a series of assignments that taught them how to effectively use Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet program provided for free to all UIC students. Excel is a widely used application in all fields of business that functions as sort of a “Swiss Army Knife” for analysis. More specifically, Excel can be used to create reports, store and analyze large data sets, generate forecasts and maintain and update company budgets; while there are applications other than Excel that can do any one of these tasks in a more sophisticated way, Excel alone can do all of this and more, making it a “must-have” tool for any business major.

While I knew I wanted to integrate Excel training into my class, I wasn’t sure how (or if) it could be done effectively. One of the biggest challenges that university instructors face is finding the balance between what is useful to students and what can be implemented and evaluated fairly and efficiently. For example, students and their employers would likely prefer project-based work to tests and quizzes, but the most compelling, complex projects are largely completed outside of the classroom and are therefore the assignments where academic honesty will be the hardest to police. In an introductory course with hundreds of students, the time-consuming nature of grading project-based work is another hurdle that stands in the way of effective implementation.

My solution was to create a series of Excel assignments where each student had a unique answer but the assignments could still be mass-graded quickly and accurately. The best part was that Excel itself provided the methods needed to achieve this goal. First, I created a fictional company with fictional customers and data provided in Excel.  I then designed a series of tasks that would teach students how to manage and analyze this data using Excel’s features and functions. These tasks increased in complexity throughout the semester, and I provided written and video job-aids for all students to help them through the tricky parts (without giving away the answers).

Importantly, at the beginning of each assignment, I ask students to put in their name and nine-digit student ID number. Unbeknownst to them, this information is used in a series of hidden Excel formulas to generate unique fictional customer data for that student. Once the assignments are handed in, I can once again use Excel functions to reverse engineer the unique correct answer for each individual student. These features have allowed me to offer these assignments to more and more students without greatly increasing the time needed to grade everything; as of this year, almost 1,500 students a year complete these assignments, and I am the only person involved in their implementation and grading.

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Presentation title: Private or Public Equity? The Evolving Entrepreneurial Finance Landscape

Abstract: The U.S. entrepreneurial finance market has changed dramatically over the last two decades. These changes have impacted both early-stage and late-stage startups, and they are the result of shifts in both the supply and demand for private and public equity capital.

At the early-stage level, technological innovations such as cloud computing in 2006 have decreased startups’ financing needs, particularly during the initial, experimental stage of the entrepreneurial process. At the same time, the emergence of incubators and of new online platforms that help connect investors to startups have contributed to a marked increase in the fundraising options available to early-stage startups. A key consequence of these changes is that entrepreneurs are increasingly able to retain control of their board and a higher equity stake after raising their initial financing rounds.

As these entrepreneurs’ startups mature, they gain access to a late-stage private equity market that has grown five-fold in the last two decades. Much of this late-stage capital is now supplied by nontraditional startup investors such as private equity funds, mutual funds and hedge funds. This abundant supply of late-stage private capital means that many late-stage startups have little need to go public to finance their growth. As a result, firms are now less likely to go public and when they do go public, they are older and have raised more private capital than in the 1990s.

What explains the increase in the supply of late-stage private capital? First, regulatory changes such as the National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996 have made it easier for venture capital and private equity funds to raise large funds. In addition, these funds have benefited from a sharp increase in allocations to private equity by institutional investors such as public pension funds and higher-education endowments. Third, the entry into the private equity market of mutual funds and hedge funds — traditional investors in public equity — has likely been spurred by the increased competition they face from passively managed index funds: Investing in private firms can help active funds beat the returns of their passive counterparts, thereby justifying the active funds’ higher fees.

Of course, the fact that successful startups can continue financing their growth while remaining private does not mean that they have to remain private. In addition to the increased supply of late-stage private capital, two demand-side changes help explain why many startups choose to remain private longer. First, founders’ increased control of their firms after raising their initial financing rounds means that they enjoy greater bargaining power vis-à-vis investors at the time of making exit decisions. Founders can use this bargaining power to fulfill their desire to maintain control of their firms by delaying their exit. Second, the secular growth in the importance of R&D investments and intangible assets means that firms face greater disclosure costs. As a result, the benefits of staying private and thus avoiding the disclosure regulations that apply to public firms have increased.

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Presentation title: Decision Centered Decarbonization: Empowering Communities to Address Local Emissions Gaps

Abstract: Meeting the Paris Agreement requires both small and large municipalities to play an active role in climate action. Traditional decarbonization frameworks for municipalities start with data and emissions estimation, encouraging targets aligned with international standards before considering local climate action. However, insights from multi-stakeholder outreach and climate action pilot initiatives in Illinois reveal that this data-to-decisions approach, with its focus on standardizing targets, often contributes to local emissions gaps. These gaps have two critical components: the ambition gap, or the difference between municipal targets and reductions needed to align with climate goals like the Paris Agreement, and the implementation gap, which reflects the challenge of translating these pledges into actionable, measurable outcomes.

The Community Led Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) initiative, launched by the UIC College of Business and the Discovery Partners Institute, leverages decision-centered decarbonization — a novel framework that reimagines how communities approach climate action. This framework reverses the conventional data-to-decision sequence by prioritizing decision-making processes rooted in decision sciences, governance and financial valuation. Rather than standardizing targets, decision-centered decarbonization employs a polycentric governance approach that empowers municipalities to initiate climate action, with investor engagement and standardized peer learning together enabling them to scale decarbonization efforts.

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