UCI Will Close Its Accelerate Business Center

The nationally acclaimed Accelerate Technology business development center at UC Irvine is being closed and its director has been fired after losing a war of wills with the university’s new business school dean.

David Blake, dean of the UCI Graduate School of Management, said Thursday that Accelerate program director Tiffany Haugen and two of her four paid staff members were dismissed as part of a normal “winding down” of the program after state and federal officials told him continued funding was uncertain.

But sources say Blake told state officials he intended to replace Haugen’s program, triggering the funding uncertainty. The dean said he wants a broader program developed with other university officials, which he intends to start next year.

Accelerate, which receives $350,000 in state and federal funding, will close its doors Dec. 31. Blake said clients would continue to receive assistance.

Blake and Haugen, said one source, have been butting heads over control of the popular business development center since the new dean took office Oct. 1.

Blake told Accelerate’s stunned staff of the decision in a meeting in his office late Wednesday, as the locks were being changed at the center’s office in a business complex next to the campus.

An irate Haugen on Thursday accused Blake of unprofessional conduct in his handling of the closure--his first major policy action in his new job.

She said that Blake has ended the program without giving staff members a reason and without regard for the fate of the center’s dozens of clients.

Haugen, who began the program in 1990 and recently accepted on its behalf a federal Small Business Administration award for outstanding assistance to developing technology businesses, called the closure a “disservice to the small-business community in Southern California.”

She said the center has been instrumental in obtaining about $75 million a year in private investment funds that have helped dozens of new businesses get started.

Additionally, Accelerate was selected by the SBA earlier this year to be one of three regional operators of a Internet site on the World Wide Web designed to link entrepreneurs with potential business investors. The program, an SBA spokesman said, was selected because it was “one of the foremost nonprofits in the nation helping entrepreneurs.”

Blake on Thursday acknowledged the Accelerate center’s successes but said the university’s entire approach to small-business development must be reexamined.

He said he has been working with the SBA and the state Trade and Commerce Agency to ensure that Accelerate clients aren’t left in the lurch.

Despite Haugen’s insistence that the program ceased normal operations Thursday morning, Blake said that the two staff members who remain will continue conducting business until the end of the year.

He said he intends to ask the three independent business consultants who advise Accelerate clients to continue working with them and that all present clients will continue to receive assistance either through UCI, the Orange County Small Business Development Center in Santa Ana or one of the five business development centers in the greater Los Angeles area.

Blake declined to discuss his reasons for removing Haugen before the program ends, but it is clear that she and the new dean had deep differences of opinion about the degree of control the university should have.

Haugen believes that Accelerate is independent of the UCI management school because it receives all but about $40,000 of its $500,000 funding from outside the university.

“I suspect, however, that the university would like to do its own program, one that it can control itself,” she said.

Blake said, however, that UCI is the program sponsor and has always been responsible for its operation.

He said that while Accelerate is ending, he and other university officials are committed to expanding UCI’s efforts to help develop new technology businesses in the region.

“Both the SBA and the state worked with me on this decision” to shut down Accelerate, he said. “But they, like we at the university, are looking forward to the next step.”

That step, he said, is “a thorough rethinking and analysis of how we can most efficiently reach out to the small-business community.”

He said he wants a “more coordinated and more focused effort, akin to a one-stop shopping center, for business outreach and assistance.”

Blake said his personal deadline for development of a new program is April 1.

Haugen, whose husband works with Blake as a professor of finance in UCI’s graduate management school, said she was unsure of her future plans.

One option, she acknowledged, would be to find a new nonprofit agency, like a community college, to sponsor Accelerate and then compete with the university for funding.