Duke Law School Launches LLM in Law and Entrepreneurship

My research on entrepreneurship and universities in America has not taken me into many law schools. And to the best of my memory, I haven’t come across any law school students who launch start-ups. (Though I am sure some do exist and many have probably joined up with some MBAs or engineering students)

Appears that Duke University Law School is ready to do something about it and have launched an LLM in Law and Entrepreneurship.

From the program’s website:

Lawyers often are among a startup’s handful of founders or leadership teams. In this context, the relationship of the lawyer and the businessperson is so intertwined that a competent lawyer must understand business and a competent businessperson must understand the law. By focusing on this intersection, the new Law and Entrepreneurship LLM Program at Duke provides a valuable foundation for lawyers who plan to be involved with innovative ventures, either as advisers, executives or CEOs.

Building on Duke Law’s existing strengths in the fields of business law, intellectual property law, and innovation policy and strategic ties to entrepreneurial companies located in nearby Research Triangle Park, this program offers a distinctive and rigorous educational experience. It also meets a growing need within the legal and business communities for lawyers who can creatively counsel and lead the innovative ventures of today and tomorrow.

NYTimes.com The Prize Covers Business Plan Competitions

Somehow I missed this, but the NY Times now has a blog called the Prize written by Lora Kolodny that covers the world of business plan competitions, prizes, and winners.

Its great to see that business plan competitions, whose roots come out of entrepreneurship education are receiving coverage from the mainstream press.

Some recent posts include:

Shopify, a Start-Up, Starts its Own Business Plan Competition

Can Main Street Win Business Plan Competitions?

Encouraging Minority Entrepreneurship at Morehouse

4 Harvard Students Bring Energy/Soccer Social Venture

Found out about this super cool new social venture  from the most recent Springwise newsletter.

Soccket is a soccer ball for the developing world that also acts as an energy harvester. Each time a ball is impacted (by a kick, head, or bounce) energy is available. The Soccket collect the energy and it can be used by a variety of devices.

This venture was created a four person team during a Harvard engineering class where they were tasked

Harvard born Soccket is on to something fun and potential game changing.

with finding a problem and solving it. The hope is that the energy from the soccer balls will be used to power lights and the use of highly dangerous and pollutive kerosene will be diminished.

The team has done a few pilot study and appear to have further plans for expansion and beefing up their revenues. They are off to a great start and have been wise in approaching a market (soccer players in the developing world) that offers abundant upside.

I will post more when I learn more, but just received this one and thought I’d share. This looks to be an interesting new social venture.

Peter Drucker and Social Innovation

Was spending some time over at Changing Higher Education and was reading a post on higher education’s social responsibilities in a globalizing economy. A lot of the piece is about educating workers that satisfy the needs of today’s businesses. The post then went on to reference some of Peter Drucker’s writings and linked to a great article on Drucker by Michael Hiltzik  of the LA Times on Dec. 31, 2009. From Hiltzik:

Drucker’s most important insight concerned the role of the corporation in society. “The business enterprise is a creature of a society and an economy, and society or economy can put any business out of existence overnight,” he wrote in 1974. “The enterprise exists on sufferance and exists only as long as the society and the economy believe that it does a necessary, useful, and productive job.”

From that simple observation sprung a wealth of further insights. It placed the corporation’s social responsibility in perspective by establishing its breadth and its limitations.

Drucker showed that there is no “inherent contradiction between profit and a company’s need to make a social contribution,” but that the former is indispensable to achieve the latter. He also warned that an enterprise that fails to “think through its impacts and its responsibilities” exposes itself to justified attack from social forces. Consumerism and environmentalism, he taught, are not enemies to be vanquished, but symptoms of business’ failure to understand its broad social role.

TV Shows Make Entrepreneurs Lead Characters

During my introductory class of New Venture Management for undergraduates I explain the role the media has played in promoting entrepreneurs and the idea of running your own business. We discuss reality shows like American Chopper (Discovery Channel) and Ax Men (History Channel) and others like Shark Tank (ABC) and How Things Are Made (Science Channel) as well as ‘news magazine’ style shows like Donny Deutsch’s The Entrepreneurs and Bloomberg TV’s Venture.

The Wall Street Journal recently had a piece by Emily Maltby that looks into the trend of reality shows based on small businesses.

Small businesses have become popular fodder for reality television, where shop owners let viewers glimpse the daily dramas of their business operations in return for big publicity.

But for the few who land their own shows, the exposure often comes with headaches.

Duff Goldman, owner of Charm City Cakes LLC, the Baltimore custom cake shop featured on the Food Network’s “Ace of Cakes,” says his crew wasn’t able to spend as much time making cakes once filming for the show started because the employees were often being pulled aside for interviews.

So Mr. Goldman shifted the company’s business model, scaling down the production and designating more energy to fewer, creative requests ranging from a Hogwarts castle to a three-foot replica of an Old Bay Seasoning can.

With less revenue from the cakes, Charm City has compensated over time with licensing deals, books, speaking events and money from the show, which, Mr. Goldman says, doesn’t add up to much once the whole staff is paid. He declined to provide figures, but said that “if the show were to disappear tomorrow, we’d still be in the black.” The Food Network said it wasn’t able to provide comment on the show.

While the article focuses on the businesses that are featured on the shows, I am currently making a list of shows that are beneficial to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship students. Looking for lesson’s within the quest for good content among television producers.

Please add your thoughts in the comments section below or email us at CampusEntrepreneurship@gmail.com. Thanks.

50 Amazing Quotes for Entrepreneurs

Good quotes can reveal a truth or challenge an assumption — often succinctly and directly. I love using quotes while working with entrepreneurship students and student entrepreneurs because the right quote can often explain the idea better than I can. The source of the quote matters too.

The Work at Home Based Business Blog has a list of 50 Success Quotes for Entrepreneurs. I will be sure to integrate some of these into my research and my teaching of entrepreneurship. Here are a few from the list that highlight why I think quotes are beneficial for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship students.

“If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.” John D Rockefeller; this is the type of quote that is used early in our entrepreneurship class to highlight that hugely successful entrepreneurs are not typically motivated by money. (They are motivated by creating a new future) The fact that it comes from John D  Rockefeller makes it incredibly powerful.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas Edison; we just discussed this one in class the other night while covering failure as a core component of entrepreneurship. During this class we often talk about the Apple Newton and the iPhone and this week we added the iPad to the discussion on entrepreneurial failure.

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” Sun Tzu; in the last year my entrepreneurship students and I have talked a lot about the recession and what it means. I try to continually remind them that there are always entrepreneurial opportunities, often  during what appear to be ‘bad times.’ For example, while major auto makers suffer (ie GM, Chrysler, Toyota), alternative energy players and after market products makers are seeing great opportunities as hybrids, electrics, GPS devices, and in car entertainment segments see innovation and growth in demand.

Please share your favorite quotes in the comment section below or email them to me. Thanks.

Rice Business Plan Competition’s Gigantic Prize Pool

Over $800,000 in prizes available to student run start-ups at the Rice University Business Plan Competition. Ka-ching!!!! Here are the rules for this university sponsored business plan competition. According to the site there have been 84 successful start-ups launched after competing. This one is well worth looking into and it highlights how certain entrepreneurship programs and universities have taken entrepreneurship education to a different level.

Entry closes February 5th and if you file your letter of intent you will receive a free copy of Palo Alto Software’s Business Plan Pro.

From the website:

42 Teams will be selected to compete at Rice University on April 15-17, 2010 in Rice Business Plan Competition.  Teams will compete for more than $800,000 in cash and prizes including a Grand Prize worth approximately $325,000.  Every team accepted into the Rice competition is guaranteed to win at least one cash prize.  The competition will be judged by more than 200 venture capital investors, angel investors, and other members of the entrepreneurial community.  Competitors receive incomparable feedback, networking opportunities and mentoring. Between 2001-2008, 85 teams who have competed have gone on to launch their ventures and have raised more than $150 million in funding.  More than 80% of 2009 competing teams have successfully launched their companies.

Forbes Hypes Business Plan Competitions

Forbes has a nice online feature looking at 15 business plan competitions across the U.S. It looks like the Kauffman Foundation has some great data on these competitions and hopefully that is a database that is available to entrepreneurship researchers.

Last Thursday, during my introductory lecture in New Venture Creation, I discussed the great opportunities that University and College sponsored business plan contests offer to students interested in or determined to be entrepreneurs. From the article:

There’s more money than ever in these competitions. At last official count in 2006 the Kauffman Foundation identified 353 business plan contests at colleges and universities. The number may have doubled since then, says Fishback, based on early feedback gleaned from Kauffman’s recent purchase of a software company that helps facilitate and track these competitions.

Startup Scramble DC University Challenge

Found out about this great opportunity from some of the people working on social entrepreneurship at GMU and Ashoka (read about the Campus Changemakers program at GMU here). The StartUp Scramble D.C. University Challenge takes place Jan 29th- 31st. According to the event site, “Entrepreneurial college students together in a weekend-long start-up event, work to pitch, plan, and launch sustainable ventures to improve society, which they will lead over the next year and beyond. “

There will be great speakers, working sessions, and a pitch contest and it will likely be a pretty intense entrepreneurial experience as the participants look to get something on the up and running and making a social impact within a year. Winners receive funding and incubation services. Great networking is likely to take place. Looking forward to learning more and seeing what comes out of this.

U of MD Birthed Legal River Launches New Products, Covered by NY Times

Great news continuing to come out of Legal River, a firm launched by MBA students at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. This past week in partnership with General Counsel, P.C., Legal River released two new products for entrepreneurs: a Terms of Service Generator and a Privacy Policy Generator. From the entry by NY Times and Venture Beat contributor Nadia Majid:

Legal River’s tools are meant to keep costs low for entrepreneurs as they set up a business; typical terms of service documents can otherwise cost thousands of dollars. An entrepreneur only needs to fill in some basic information, such as the name of the company, information the company receives from a customer (for the privacy policy), and business structure (for the terms of service). The appropriate document is returned to the user online almost immediately, along with a version in HTML code, and the relevant policy is also emailed to the email address provided. Both tools are hosted on Legal River’s site and were developed by General Counsel, P.C.