More than sixty of the school's MBA candidates traveled to Portland October 27-29 for the 2011 Net Impact Conference, the annual gathering of graduate students and professionals committed to using business skills to make the world a better place. Our students have traditionally made a strong showing at these events. This year they enjoyed an especially high profile because, in addition to being a conference co-host, the UO chapter played a leading role in organizing it. What's it like to transition from attendee to organizer?

What a weekend it was. For over half a decade, ESPN College GameDay's annual stop in Eugene has provided an extra jolt of big-screen excitement to the fall football season. This year, excitement rose to new heights for all of us at the Lundquist College when, for the first time ever, the folks from ESPN chose UO Memorial Quad for the site of the October 15 GameDay Broadcast, with the Lillis Business Complex as a backdrop.

A new vision for our Executive MBA program, MBA students take on a wind-power project, T. Bettina Cornwell on branding and the very young, and more.

Fall term is off to an exciting start, with 855 undergraduates entering as prebusiness majors. October 12 is the date of the New Majors Celebration, when the entire college will join together to congratulate the 350 students who have progressed to full business major status since last spring.

Starting next summer, students in our Portland-based executive MBA program will have the chance to broaden their perspectives with a stint in Europe, via the UO | Nyenrode international study program, offered in partnership with Nyenrode Business Universiteit in The Netherlands. (In subsequent years the program will be expanded to include undergraduates and other students.) On the U.S.

Five new faculty members have joined the Lundquist College of Business this fall. Some are up-and-coming talent. Others are already renowned in their fields. Their areas of expertise span many topics, including sports business, statistical analysis and mathematical optimization, disclosure policy, executive risk-taking, management, and more.

Now you can read UO Business before it's even been printed.

"Top notch"--that's what US News & World Report's college guide called our business program in a recent article on the University of Oregon. (The Lillis Business Complex and its solar panels were also singled out for special mention.) Meanwhile, The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur ranked the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship among the nation's top twenty-five for graduate-level entrepreneurship education--making this the fourth time in the past five years the center has been numbered among this elite group.

Can children be tempted into healthier eating habits through the promise of receiving a collectible toy? The answer is yes, especially if that toy is the final piece needed to complete a set. This was the surprising finding in a two-part study of preschoolers by marketing professor T. Bettina Cornwell and her coauthor, Anna McAlister, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Launched last year as part of the UO's diversity initiative, the Building Business Leaders project welcomes its second group of incoming students. Catch up with the first cohort in this video. Competing in the elite Venture Labs Investment Competition (formerly Moot Corp.), UO start-up teams won honors in their respective tracks: Sonas for Best Written Plan and Best Presentation, and VisiRay for Best Written Plan.

It was a match made in start-up heaven. Doug Anderson, MBA '11, and Paul Clark, MBA '11, were looking for a real-life project to apply the skills they'd honed in the business school's venture launch pathway. UO architecture professor Ihab Elzeyadi was looking for a way to commercialize the SolarStream Awning, an innovative three-in-one green building product he had recently developed.