MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – West Virginia University has renamed its business school as the John Chambers College of Business and Economics, after WVU alumnus and chairman emeritus of global technology giant Cisco Systems Inc.
Chambers and WVU also announced on Friday an agreement that will provide WVU significant financial and intellectual resources” in the form of a gift of time, talent and treasure to support a recently announced start-up engine at the college. WVU and Chambers agreed not to disclose the dollar amount.
“I’m betting on the Mountaineers and believe my home state can become a start-up state if the university, business and public sectors come together to support transformative innovation,” said Chambers, 69, a native of Charleston.
The start-up engine will support business development, innovation and investment in West Virginia.
Among the politicians, dignitaries and business leaders attending the announcement were U.S. Sens. Shelley Moore Capito and Joe Manchin, state Senate President Mitch Carmichael and House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, former WVU President David Hardesty and representatives for Gov. Jim Justice and Rep. David McKinley.
WVU President Gordon Gee said, “John is a proven leader who is comfortable dreaming big and taking risks. Those are the same attributes that define who we are as a university. We have the incredible opportunity to make effective change by becoming a start-up university.”
B&E Dean Javier Reyes will lead the initiative as vice president for Start-up West Virginia, coordinating efforts across the university that contribute to the state’s innovation economy.
Reyes also will work collaboratively with the leaders of West Virginia Forward, the state Department of Commerce, the National Guard and the governor’s office to grow and diversify West Virginia’s economy.
Chambers’ gift will include financial support to:
— build out and operate the start-up engine;
— create a philanthropic venture capital fund in support of the project;
— create a Center for Artificial Intelligence Management to explore AI’s opportunities and challenges;
— Establish a fund to support the creation of the Center for AI Management.
Chambers will also volunteer 5 percent of his time to provide expertise to WVU and its leadership, a similar arrangement to ones he has with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Chambers earned business and law degrees from WVU. Before joining Cisco, he worked at IBM and Wang Laboratories. He joined Cisco as a senior executive in 1991. At the time it employed 400 and was worth $70 million.
He became CEO in 1995 and board chair in 2006, stepping down as CEO in 2015. During his tenure, Cisco acquired 180 companies and grew in value to $47 billion per year, employing 70,000. The promo copy for his new book, released in September – Connecting the Dots, subtitled Lessons for Leadership in a Startup World – says he turned more than 10,000 employees into millionaires.
He is now a venture capitalist and business coach, under his new job as CEO of JC2 Ventures, where he mentors and invests in startups – 16 so far.
He’s also on a mission to help diversify West Virginia’s economy by transitioning it to a startup state in partnership with WVU.
He says in his book, “As an investor and advisor to start-ups worldwide, I’m incredibly excited by the potential for new technologies to foster longer lives, safer communities and greater global prosperity, as well as to create hundreds of millions of new jobs.” This will result in some disruption, though. “This disruption will be so brutal that 40-plus percent of businesses today won’t be here 10 years from now.”
Regarding West Virginia, he says in the book, “If we come together to invest in start-ups, innovations, skills training and digitization, there’s no reason why West Virginia can’t rise again. … The key to this will be strong leadership from the public and private sectors and from educational institutions like West Virginia University.”
Chambers has received numerous awards for his leadership, including being named the number two “Best-Performing CEOs in the World” in 2015 from Harvard Business Review and receiving the Edison Achievement Award for Innovation. Chambers was most recently awarded the Outstanding Civil Service Medal by the U.S. Army, as well as France’s National Defense Gold Medal, the only foreign business leader to ever receive the award in its 35-year history.
Chambers is also a member of the Woodburn Circle Society, the WVU Foundation’s most prestigious philanthropic society.
This report will be updated.
Story by David Beard