Marcom|b2b|communications|Rick Short|business|blog
Marcom Star — Dr. Ralph Oliva
Executive Director, Institute for the Study of Business Markets
Professor of Marketing, Smeal College of Business
Ralph is the Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, and Professor of Marketing in the Smeal College of Business Administration at Penn State University. He is driving the growth of the ISBM as the leading academic center devoted to advancing knowledge and practice in Business-to-Business marketing worldwide. The ISBM is supported by 60 major firms, and a network of over 100 researchers, all focused on B-to-B.
Ralph is a regular columnist for Marketing Management magazine, and is active in Executive Education, as well as the Smeal College MBA program, where he received the “Outstanding MBA Faculty Award” for 2001-2002.
Before joining Penn State, Ralph spent 23 years in B-to-B and consumer marketing, and established a “Virtual University” for marketing at Texas Instruments. He has served as Vice President of Market Communications and Design for TI worldwide, as well as leader of the TI Web Team.
Fun thing going on right now: Research on “Ingredient Brands.”
“My friends at many B-to-B firms invent new things –molecules, chips, services, inventions of all sorts- and then pass them down the value chain. We miss the opportunity to create and harvest new value by branding these ingredients. We’re working to better understand when, why and how this can work.”
Ralph developed the “DLP” brand program (TI’s first ingredient branding strategy) and worked on several landmark products (including TI’s “Speak and Spell”, and the TI-30 calculator). His articles can be found at www.isbm.org, and www.ralpholiva.com
Ralph holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Solid State Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a B.S. in Physics from Fordham University.
