The president of a major broadcasting network division, a high-profile cancer researcher and the general manager of a basketball team all have one thing in common ““ they’re all women.
The inaugural Knapp Innovation, Creativity & Knowledge Conference for Women, or KICK, will take place on Friday at the UCLA Anderson School of Management from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m..
The event, co-hosted by the Anderson School and the Knapp Foundation, was created to bring together successful female leaders in business to promote creativity and innovation and, in turn, economic growth, said Betsy Wood Knapp, conference co-founder and member of the UCLA Anderson School Board of Visitors.
Knapp, who has helped create several programs at the Anderson School, wanted to organize a conference that focused mainly on women in the professional world.
“We want to inspire women to use their own innate skills in leadership,” Knapp said. “There are not very many conferences that talk to women and focus on creativity and innovation specifically.”
The KICK conference, which is open to anyone with the purchase of a ticket, will be divided up into several themed panels, such as health care and entrepreneurship, featuring expert speakers from relevant fields. There will also be a networking session during which audience members can meet with the speakers and other attendees as well.
“The audience is going to be very broad, from women in corporate America to small startup companies,” Knapp said.
Judy Olian, dean of the Anderson School and co-host of the conference, also expressed interest in appealing to women from a diverse range of business sectors.
“Anytime that we can showcase great leaders who happen to be women is an opportunity to provide role models for women who aspire to be such leaders,” Olian said. “Innovation cuts across all generations and forms of leadership.”
While most of the speakers are leaders of large companies, many of them started out as entrepreneurs. Susan Wojcicki, an Anderson alumna and vice president of product management at Google, considers herself both a corporate executive and an entrepreneur. She chose to participate in the panel about innovative technology in order to share her experiences in both roles.
“In order to be a successful leader, you need to have a passion for what you are doing,” said Wojcicki.
Wojcicki, one of the first employees at Google, is responsible for designing new advertising plans amid constantly evolving technology.
“The Web still has so much potential. Everything is moving online, and technology is getting a lot more personal,” Wojcicki said. “In areas like technology, you have to have a good vision of what is changing and what will become the future.”
Wojcicki also added that she believes a leader must take risks in order to reap a higher reward and create a profitable company.
Professionals and graduate students are not the only demographics Knapp and Olian hope to target at the KICK conference. Twenty-eight high school students from the West Los Angeles area were selected to attend the conference in hopes of fostering a sense of what business could mean to younger generations.
“(Olian and I) wanted to expose the students to business role models that they could look up to,” Knapp said.
Diversity was an important factor when choosing speakers for the event, Olian said.
“We wanted to create a powerful event that showcased a lot of creativity, innovation and knowledge creation,” Olian said. “Those are the engines of growth in this new economy.”