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Innovation Center Puts UA And J.B. Hunt on Same Road

5 min read

The chance to work for J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. of Lowell is nothing new for a lot of graduates of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Now, UA students will have the chance to work with J.B. Hunt.

The Fortune 500 transportation and logistics company recently gave $2.75 million to start a partnership with the UA’s engineering and business colleges. The J.B. Hunt Innovation Center of Excellence will be led by a committee made up of representatives of the two colleges and J.B. Hunt executives.

“This is probably the coolest thing to happen to me,” said Chase Rainwater, an associate professor of industrial engineering named as the co-director of the center.

The steering committee meets for the first time in May to decide the initial focuses of the collaboration. Rainwater said the center will pursue “next-generation issues and solutions” with a mixture of J.B. Hunt employees, university researchers and undergraduate students.

“This is a much different situation than a typical research grant,” Rainwater said. “We’re not going to do this in silos. We don’t report to J.B. Hunt every six months. We’ll talk to them every week.”

J.B. Hunt executives hope the center will find solutions to supply chain management problems to improve efficiency. Stuart Scott, the company’s chief information officer, and Chief Marketing Officer Shelley Simpson, who is also the president of J.B. Hunt’s integrated capacity solutions and truckload divisions, will be on the center’s steering committee. Their presence is a clear sign of how important J.B. Hunt considers the project.

“The J.B. Hunt Innovation Center of Excellence will allow us to pursue revolutionary ideas in supply chain technology that can have a game-changing impact on the industry,” Scott said in a statement when the center was announced in late March. “The innovative ideas that will shape our industry’s future are with the students of today, and we’re proud to be working with some of the best and brightest business, engineering and computer science students at the University of Arkansas.”

Center Seen as Model
Matt Waller couldn’t be more excited about the Innovation Center coming to the university.

Waller is the dean of the Sam M. Walton College of Business and is a supply chain expert, having served as chairman of the Department of Supply Chain Management since its inception in 2011. He thinks the Innovation Center itself is an important, innovative step in the growing world of collaboration between businesses and academia.

“I think this may become a model of the future in terms of how businesses and universities collaborate,” Waller said. “The J.B. Hunt Innovation Center of Excellence is really exciting to faculty, staff and students because we’re on the cusp of some major changes in business, in industry and even in academia. These types of models of industry-university collaborations are going to expand. It has to. The number of parties that are winning from an agreement like this is unheard of.”

Waller agreed with Rainwater’s assessment that the center’s funding is a new type of grant. Before, when a UA researcher wanted to pursue an idea, he or she wrote a grant proposal and hoped to attract the support and financing from a company the research might affect; sometimes the research would take years to make a difference in the industry.

The Innovation Center speeds the process, with researchers working hand in hand with a company whose lifeblood is supply chain solutions.

“The effects of technology on many industries is hard to get your head around,” Waller said. “It’s happening at such a high rate of speed, and it seems to be accelerating right now. Typically when companies get involved with universities, they’ll provide a research grant. It can take months or years to get results.

“The problem is that things are changing so quickly, technologies are coming out so quickly, applications of existing technologies are being created so quickly that there is not enough time to wait years.”

The university is no stranger to collaborating with some of the state’s most successful companies and executives. In 2016, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. CEO Doug McMillon used a portion of a $1 million donation to fund the McMillon Innovation Studio, a research lab for the Center of Retailing Excellence.

Trust Factor
It’s noteworthy that McMillon and Simpson are both graduates of the Walton College of Business.

Rainwater said “tons” of engineering and computer science graduates have gone from the university to work at J.B. Hunt. Waller said the familiarity the school’s officials have with the company’s executives — and vice versa — made it easier to put the partnership idea into action.

Waller said the idea hatched when J.B. Hunt and the university were discussing executive education programs. He said John English, the dean of the College of Engineering, had worked with Hunt officials, too.

“Some companies are very reluctant to do things like this, but J.B. Hunt has always been fairly innovative,” Waller said.

“I don’t think they would still be in business if they weren’t as innovative as they are. We are more intimately connected than maybe any other college’s business and engineering [departments] are. Trust is very important. J.B. Hunt has worked enough with us to know we deliver what we promise. They knew that we collaborated well together.”

The interdisciplinary collaboration is a growing focus of the university’s academic goals. Having more smart minds — each looking at problems from a different perspective — can help the innovation process.

“Most innovation comes from combining things that aren’t typically combined,” Waller said. “We’ll probably get some really quick wins out of this. We’re all in this together. The better that J.B. Hunt does, the better the University of Arkansas does. The better the University of Arkansas does, the better J.B. Hunt does. It’s a win-win.”

Waller said J.B. Hunt will take an active role in the center. Its executives will obviously be part of steering the focus, and other employees will be in the room with the researchers and students.

“One thing that is exciting is so many different parties benefit through this,” Waller said. “It’s not just a handoff. J.B. Hunt will have employees on a regular basis rubbing elbows with the researchers at the university. Some of those researchers will be professors, some of them will be graduate students, and some will be undergraduate students.

“The students aren’t going to just be working on projects that are interesting and maybe were relevant a year ago or 10 years ago. They’re going to be working on projects that are relevant right now.”

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