The Beyster Institute
The Beyster Institute was founded by the FED in 2002, to take on the commission to spread the visionary ideas of Dr. J. Robert Beyster. In 2004, the Beyster Institute joined the Rady School of Management at the UC San Diego, a leading professional school within one of the top-ranked institutions in the U.S. for higher education and research.
The Beyster Institute continues to promote the understanding and practice of employee ownership as an effective and responsible business model through its extensive education initiatives and consulting practice.
Curriculum Library for Employee Ownership (CLEO)
The FED and the Employee Ownership Foundation collaborated to create the largest online Curriculum Library on Employee Ownership (CLEO), including more than 700 teaching materials such as company case studies, syllabi, videos, and other educational materials. This library continues to grow with additions from scholars, service organizations, and companies.
CLEO has a new home at Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR). The library is an excellent addition to an already renowned school in the field of employee ownership. As the largest online library on employee ownership, CLEO deepens the resources and extends the global reach of the already established research and education programs offered by the school, including the professorship, symposia, and fellowships.
We the Owners – Documentary Film
FED produced an award-winning documentary film, We the Owners: Employees Expanding the American Dream, which captures stories from founders and employee owners on the impacts and challenges of being owners. Since being released in 2012, the film is a success:
- In hundreds of classrooms
- For hundreds of companies
- In 8 film festivals to hundreds of viewers
- With awards at 2 film festivals, incl. Best Documentary Film Short
- With sales in 18 countries
- At more than 75 screenings
- Through multiple public broadcasts across the nation
As of June 2017, the FED transferred the film to Rutgers University, School of Management and Labor Relations.
SAIC Solution
In The SAIC Solution: Built by Employee Owners, Dr. J. Robert Beyster — who founded SAIC in 1969, and grew it into the nation’s largest employee-owned research and engineering company — provides a guide to implementing principles and practices developed and used by SAIC to drive exponential growth, global expansion, and diversification across science and technology customers and markets. Topics include:
- Sustaining a people-first culture
- Linking contribution to rewards
- Experimenting with management structures and business investment
- Balancing reasonable profit and sustainable, accelerating growth
Names, Numbers, and Network Solutions
In 1995, SAIC acquired Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI) – a small telecommunications and computer network consulting business at the time. However this “routine” acquisition turned out to be something quite out of the ordinary: with the Internet boom around the corner, and NSI having control over Internet domain name registration, new, unprecedented challenges lay ahead. Dr. Beyster penned this timely and relevant story of the unpredictability of business, the challenges presented by rapid growth, and the lessons learned through these experiences in a book called Names, Numbers and Network Solutions: The Monetization of the Internet. Written in collaboration with Michael A. Daniels, the book offers a glimpse into the future challenges to be addressed through the eyes of those who navigated the uncharted waters of Internet security, privacy, social networking, politics and policy—and much more—during the exponential growth of the World Wide Web in the 1990s.
Business Simulation Tool
In collaboration with the FED, MIT Systems Dynamics Center has designed and launched CleanStart, a free business simulation tool where participants play the role of a founder of a startup company in the exciting and competitive clean tech sector. The live, web-based simulation includes employee ownership impacts along with decisions on compensation, financing, and product development.
We are proud to have had our Beyster Fellow, Joseph Hsueh, work on this tool. Instructional and teaching video guides are available.
Entrepreneurial Ownership for Technical Students
The Beyster Fund at University of Michigan’s Center for Entrepreneurship (CFE) is supporting the expansion of essential employee ownership concepts in STEM education at the university and across the entrepreneurial community. CFE at the College of Engineering developed and delivers an Entrepreneurial Ownership course. Case studies on actual entrepreneurial situations have been written to enhance entrepreneurial skills and capabilities, improve understanding of the way alternative ownership decisions affect organizational dynamics, and take an in-depth look at specific mechanisms that entrepreneurs can use to create positive ownership outcomes.