CEI Faculty
Dr. Hayri Ozkaya
Dr. Ozkaya is the CBA Professor of Innovation, and Associate Professor of Marketing and International Business at the International Business and Marketing Department. He is the founding director of NASA-Cal Poly Pomona Business Startup Program (NASA-CPP BSP) and the Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Being founding director, he oversees and facilitates the introduction of professors and their students to projects in collaboration with real companies. Through participation in these projects, students create meaningful industry relationships and gain professional consulting abilities, as well as priceless experiences. He also ensures that the CEI provides students with useful workshops and mentorship revolving entrepreneurship.
Dr. Zeynep Aytug
Dr. Aytug is an Assistant Professor at the Management and Human Resources Department, and the Training and Development Coordinator and one of the Project Managers at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She provides consultancy services to CEI’s corporate clients, and collaborates with CPP and external experts to ensure a state-of-the-art line-up of managerial and entre/intra-preneurial workshops to the campus. She finds being a part of the CEI extremely rewarding. CEI provides the perfect combination of CPP’s strategic goals: It delivers quality education that integrates learning, discovery and creativity; enhances student learning, development and success; and strengthens CPP’s economic vitality and positive impact. CEI is the living product of the true CPP culture to Dr. Aytug.
Dr. Mohammad Salehan
Dr. Salehan was selected to join the team because of his expertise in Software Development. He holds a BSc in Software Engineering and has worked as a Software Developer for 5 years. Mohammad helps the team with technical terms, reviews the reports generated by students, and prepares a list of key success factors that are used for competitor analysis. He believes that through the program, students learn about key success factors and gain experience on how to select competitors and how to compare them. The project also provides companies great insights into the competitive environment of markets in the US and sets the tone for their future endeavors.
Dr. Alexander Mitchell
Dr. Mitchell is a faculty team member of the Center for Entrepreneurship. His focus is on market analysis, marketing strategy, and promotional strategy development. As a teacher, having close connections with industry professionals offers opportunities for student learning that are unmatched. On the one hand, students get the chance to see first-hand the challenges facing the industry and how their education here at Cal Poly Pomona is helping to prepare them for those challenges. But, it's also about bringing a level of intimacy to the challenges, by having students interact directly with key decision-makers from the organizations to see that strategic choices are not made by faceless corporations but by real people with hopes, beliefs, and goals for their businesses and for society. Students’ experiences working with Phenix in my class were some of the most meaningful and positive of their university careers, in large part because of the degree of intimacy with both members of the company and the social relevance of the business challenges.
Dr. Nastaran Simarasl
Dr. Simarasl is an assistant professor of the MHR Department, introduced to the Center for Entrepreneurship through a project revolving LogoVista, a high-tech startup in Japan with an urgent need to have a competitive analysis done for their new product development. As soon as she heard about this opportunity, Dr. Simarasl expressed interest in taking this project to her BUS 4950 courses (Capstone Strategic Management). LogoVista turned into a consulting client for her students. Dr. Simarasl helped students understand that in real-world settings, not everything is completely predictable and business professionals should be flexible to embark on new opportunities as they unfold. Student teams had to conduct comprehensive internet research and discuss their results for different parts of the project. Overall, students significantly benefited from this experience by not only learning strategic management concepts and theories but also by being encouraged to step out of their comfort zone. The feedback received from LogoVista’s top management team indicated that they were satisfied with the result of the students’ work and that they had found the outcomes of the project invaluable and helpful in moving their new product development initiatives forward.