The Best

An intellectual curiosity about the world beyond his small town Utah upbringing and a “do it now” attitude of a true entrepreneur put Dr. John Sargent on a strong path to become an inspiring teacher and a top researcher in his field of international business and entrepreneurship at The University of Texas-Pan American.

Choosing early on to concentrate on business practices in Latin America, Sargent earned his Ph.D. in organizational behavior from University of Washington, writing a dissertation titled “Skills Acquisition in the Maquiladoras.” Most often collaborating on his research with his wife Dr. Linda Matthews Sargent, associate professor of management, Professor Sargent has become a national expert on the maquiladora industry and the dynamics of conducting business on the United States/Mexico international border.

“In college I would pick up the Christian Science Monitor or the Economist magazine and always liked to read about the social issues going on in developing countries. I was very interested in crossing borders and understanding different cultures, different economic and political systems and different people,” said Sargent, who perfected his noted fluency in Spanish through memorization he practiced while working out or mopping the floors at his part-time job while in graduate school.

“In his studies of maquiladoras, Sargent has interviewed workers as well as plant managers at more than 200 facilities throughout Mexico. His interest in Latin American business practices has also resulted in tours and meetings with managers of a number of Mexican industry giants such as Groupo FEMSA, a multinational corporation headquartered in Monterrey. He is also an active member of the Business Association for Latin American Studies, currently serving as the U.S. and Canada representative.

While he was recently recognized by his College of Business Administration colleagues with a Faculty Excellence Award for Service, Sargent, who has served the University in many capacities including a two-year stint as Faculty Senate chair, said he’s most fulfilled by his role and accomplishments as a teacher and researcher in the Department of Management, Marketing and International Business.

“There has always been a close tie for me between research and teaching. If you want to understand something, talk to people, get to know something up close and personal,” Sargent said.

He began his initial stream of research in 1992 after traveling from Washington to spend a year in the El Paso/Juarez, Mexico area examining the role maquiladoras played in economic development. His most recent research in 2009 looks at the effect of increased global competition, particularly from China, on maquiladora mortality.

“This research stream has generated contacts, interests and expertise that you can directly bring into the classroom to benefit students,” Sargent said.

Two years ago he initiated the Strategies for the Border Corridor course at UTPA funded by a U.S. Department of Education grant. The course, which is open to master’s students from any discipline, offers students the opportunity to visit and interact with people working at companies in San Antonio and McAllen and the cities of Reynosa and Monterrey in Mexico. Besides site visits, students hear from company executives and participate in a group project and presentation to better learn about the issues and complexities that affect border corridor business.

“One of the great things about UTPA and higher education in general is the tremendous value realized in study travel abroad and getting students out of the classroom. In this class we actually take them to the FEMSA headquarters in Monterrey or to the LG electronics facility in Reynosa, a world class company where they are making cell phones and flat screen plasma TVs. It is a class for people who want to work on the border and be engaged in international trade whether you come from the business or engineering side,” Sargent said.

Sargent is heavily involved in UTPA’s goal to build a world class program in entrepreneurship. He is the coordinator of the Entrepreneurship Cluster formed in 2007 by faculty members in the Colleges of Business Administration and Science and Engineering as well as the University’s Office of Innovation and Intellectual Property to increase the quantity and quality of entrepreneurship education on campus and in the community.

Last year the cluster hosted its first Entrepreneurship Speaker Series and was a partner in offering two entrepreneurial boot camps, one technology-based. It supports other initiatives including the business college’s Great Business Idea contest and a new Business Plan contest planned for 2010, both open to all students. He also plans to help in the formation of a new student organization on campus focused on entrepreneurship – the Collegiate Entrepreneurship Organization (CEO) club.

“What entrepreneurs need is content knowledge in something. Then they need to have the business skills to take that content knowledge and create value – to hire people, to get financing, to give convincing presentations, to put together a business plan,” he said. “You need to combine these skills. This is what entrepreneurship education needs to be about.”

In Sargent’s Entrepreneurship/New Venture Creation class graduate business students learn what it takes to initiate and manage new growth-oriented ventures and are brought together with typically undergraduate engineering students working on their senior projects to facilitate their working together on a plan to commercialize the project’s product. Transitioning these technology-based ideas and products to items that can be marketed successfully is necessary to transform the region to one that can support higher wages Sargent says.

As a student in this class, Julia Otken, a recent graduate of UTPA’s MBA program in international business, had the opportunity to develop a technology commercialization plan for a product involving a nanotechnology drug delivery system for cancer treatment invented by a faculty member at The University of Texas at Austin.

“Dr. Sargent facilitated the research my group and I worked on for our term research paper. In this class we had the chance to obtain real-world experience where we were active members in identifying the steps to commercialization by research and interviews with people in the field. We were also able to present the process of commercialization to peers and medical professionals at UT Austin,” she said.

Otken said Sargent’s course helped establish relationships between different academic disciplines and will potentially increase the number of products to market at UTPA. She rated Sargent an excellent professor and mentor based on a number of key traits she said he exhibited.

“Dr. Sargent is always learning and researching. It is obvious that he enjoys being an educator and philosopher and he exhibits strong respect for his colleagues and students,” she said.

Sargent’s encouragement and mentoring helped inspire Zach Foughty, a former Teach for America instructor at W.A. Todd Junior High School in Donna who will earn his MBA from UTPA in 2011, to take a business concept of establishing one school in the country of Belize to a string of schools on the country’s many small offshore islands.

“Dr. Sargent really challenged me to think about expanding the business model outside of the first school that I and a missionary friend there will be starting in August – to push the model from a small scale to a large scale operation. With his guidance, I came up with a plan to add additional high schools across Central America, serving poor, rural communities that have limited access to education after either fifth or eighth grade,” said Foughty, who will continue with his studies from Belize via UTPA’s telecampus.

Sargent said Foughty and people like Tom Torkelson, local founder and CEO of the IDEA Public Schools, are shining lights for the concept of social entrepreneurship.

“We want to teach students the skills to take an idea that might have value, whether it will create financial wealth and/or solve a worthwhile social cause and build an organization around it that takes it from one person having an idea to something that could really impact society,” Sargent said. “We need to set up systems to capture this entrepreneurial dynamic in all its forms through all our academic disciplines.”

For more information on programs available in the College of Business Administration go to www.utpa.edu/coba.