Reimaging, rebranding, a new logo? Sounds like the beginning of an advertising campaign for a new product. And in many ways it is, except the product in this case is the University of Washington business school.

It's not often that an institution as large as the UW has the opportunity to radically transform itself. But thanks to the arrival of a large charitable donation, a dynamic local business climate, ever-tighter connections to Asia and the hiring of Mark Emmert as president, transformation is now a real possibility at the university's business school.

The money is the bequest from the Foster Foundation, a $36.5 million catalyst for change that will allow the school to realize its loftiest ambitions. Part of that money goes for new building construction, while other chunks are earmarked for student scholarships and faculty hiring, and $10 million will be set aside as "innovation and seed money" for the next decade.

Jim Jiambalvo, dean of the newly christened Michael G. Foster School of Business, envisions it "to be the best public business school in the nation." To make that happen, the school will not only add new facilities, but also undertake an aggressive campaign to rebrand the school as a center for the creation of new business leaders.

It's a change that was long overdue, Jiambalvo says. Back in the 1980s, before such things as objective third-party rankings of America's business schools, the UW was fond of letting the world know its business school was among the top 20 such institutions in the nation. Quite an accomplishment for a provincial academy in this Pacific Northwest backwater.

 Alas, "there were probably a hundred business schools that would say, 'We're in the top 20,'" says Jiambalvo. "We were a little sleepy, and a little self-satisfied."

Later, respected publications such as Business Week and the Wall Street Journal began actually studying schools of business and rating institutions based on the quality of instruction, the effectiveness of their programs, and the success of their students.

When those rankings were published, the UW found itself somewhere below 50th. "I think that was the wake-up call," Jiambalvo says.

Such public acknowledgment of mediocrity spurred the school to reinvent itself. The money is going to allow it to happen. To be the best public business school means joining the ranks of and surpassing the University of Michigan, UCLA, Berkeley and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. The UW may never supplant Harvard, Wharton or Stanford, but it's an ambitious goal nonetheless for Washington's once-sleepy B-school.

 The school has a plan, of course. But perhaps no one in the country is in a better position to explain what it takes to become No. 1 than Robert J. Dolan, dean of the Steven M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, named the top public business school in 2004 and again in 2006 by the Wall Street Journal. Before Michigan, Dolan spent 21 years as a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School.

The Wall Street Journal lauded Michigan's emphasis on action-based learning, a program that sends student teams anywhere in the country or the world, puts them in real-life situations and expects them to perform successfully. "The most important thing to think about is how you are going to be distinctive in this world of business schools," says Dolan, who estimates there are just 20 to 25 schools that truly are exceptional. "What we did was ask, 'What could be our niche - that we can do better than anyone else?' And we came up with action-based learning.