Campus Entrepreneurship

Found this blog by Vijay Anand, a serial entrepreneur who works out of IIT-Madras. (IIT is short for Indian Institute of Technology). Just cool to watch some campus entrepreneurs doing their thing in India. There is some talk about incubators and accelerators on his ‘about‘ page.

Elizabeth Willet, an MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, is here pitching her new venture, an ISP and tech support business targeting ‘old fogeys.’

It sounds like older folks would pay a monthly fee for her firm to install and maintain computers, internet, printers, etc as well as offering training to the clients.

She is at the back of napkin stage of her venture but seems to have a nice clear idea of her market, her services, and her revenue model. We know from the Boomer Business Plan Contest that lots of people are interested in providing new and better products and services to the growing number of older Americans.

One thought that I would offer Willet, (more…)

The democratization of higher education has been costly, but has created huge and profitable industries — from housing and textbooks to loans and 529s .

That old model has been shaken — Harvard University recently announced a new plan to provide full and partial tuition grants to many of its students (those whose families make up to $180,000 a year). Already, other schools (including Yale) have followed suit or made similar announcements. (BTW, is this a signal that they don’t value their own BA’s?)

Is this the opening of an age of innovation in the pricing of higher education? (think of Harvard’s new plan as the iPod of education). The Acton MBA (which has been mentioned recently on this blog) offers a fellowship model that is interesting. This blog also recently highlighted a company from which students lease textbooks rather than buy them.

Ideas/technologies/trends/entrepreneurs, typically start out on the edge. When it comes to education, Harvard and Yale are way out on the edge (outliers) on many fronts — from reputation to endowments to alumni networks and research impact.

Clearly more and more colleges, universities, community colleges, and other tuition based educational institutions will begin tweaking, expanding, mutating this action taken by Harvard. The opportunity is there — who is going to jump in? Its not just going to be the schools.

A side note — a potential unintended consequence of this price cutting (more…)

From the press release;

Stern Board of Overseer Ira Leon Rennert, Chairman and CEO of the private investment firm the Renco Group and longstanding supporter of entrepreneurship at the School, committed $3.5 million. His gift will enhance the seed funding currently awarded to traditional track winners in Stern’s nationally recognized Business Plan Competition, as well as create a new faculty chair in entrepreneurship to support a top research scholar in the field.

Separately, home computer market pioneer Beny Alagem, founder of Packard Bell Electronics and the owner of the world famous Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, and the Alagem Family gave a gift of $3 million to support the entrepreneurship programming and resources available to Stern’s students, alumni and faculty.

After the positive response to the first Acton MBA post, I went by YouTube.com and found a bunch of videos on the Acton MBA. Below is the basic intro video. Here is a link to all their videos.

Something is going on at Duke University. I recently came across CampusDestinations.com (screenshot of their Wake Forest site is above), a site started by 2 Duke students. The idea of their company is to be the mapquest of campuses. Not a bad idea. Here is a press release with an article from the Daily Tarheel (upon the launching of CampusDestinations at UNC;

The site’s main component, which lets students search for directions to campus buildings, will be operational within six months. (more…)

Nice piece that delves into the manic nature of startups — that should add up to a good time. Cornwall calls for moderation. Easier said than done.

Update: I am currently in that phase right now with my new startup. (more…)

I had read about the new Acton MBA a few months back, but couldn’t remember where. Tonight I found a great article about this unique MBA/entrepreneurship program — founded by some UT Austin Profs/Entrepreneurs.

I am so happy to see this because one of my biggest complaints about academia is the lack of entrepreneurship that occurs within it. Trying to do things differently is frowned upon. Stick to the traditional literature and theories, blah, blah.  From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Far too often, students learn to regurgitate what a professor tells them,” says Jeff Sandefer, the third-generation Texas oilman and former University of Texas at Austin entrepreneurship professor who co-founded the school.

At Acton, students complete M.B.A.’s in one year rather than the traditional two. “They develop a real respect for the difficulty of sales,” he says. “A lot of times, M.B.A. students think of themselves as being above the sales force. It’s not easy to be told ‘no’ 99 times and to have to stand up, put your ego aside, and ask again.” (more…)

Found this (h/t BusinessPundit.com) blog entry that tells of the trials and tribulation of a startup — mycarpoolstation.com — that is struggling. Lets learn something from their difficulties. From the entry,

We did not find the perfect product/market fit.
My original vision, circa 2005, was “to supply web-based, community-run carpool stations to schools, workplaces, and regions in the U.S. and Canada” (i.e. to build a Facebook clone but for carpooling). We would make money off ads exclusively. By the time we finished building our Alpha in 2007, we ran out of resources and realized that we needed to build something different to execute my 2005 vision in 2007/2008: we needed to build a Facebook app, an OpenSocial app, a stand-alone website, and offer enterprise-branded carpool stations with an API. Of course, if you’re bootstrapping you’re going to have to build traction and release these one at a time. The business model would probably change as well. It would be ad-based for app users and membership-based (with no ads) for website users and enterprise users. There’s also the possibility of a token-based economy.

Most academic administrators and researchers who look into entrepreneurship on campus focus on technology transfer — namely, how scientific advances made at the university can be commercialized to a) aid economic growth, thus letting society/the economy benefit from knowledge accumulation and b) provide $$ for the school and the professors.

Here is an update from the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship on tech transfer and a new tech transfer initiative from the Kauffman Foundation.

Inspired by positive results from a joint study with the Max Planck Institute of Economics, the Kauffman Foundation has formed a network that will bring ‘proof of concept’ centers together to move university innovations into the marketplace. These centers provide seed funding to university-based early stage research as well as a host of advisory services and educational initiatives to assist students and faculty with market research, mentoring, development and testing of innovations, preparation of business plans and connections to the commercial market.

Click here to read more from Kauffman, download the report, and watch a video on the initiative.

I still believe the focus on tech and tech transfer is a bit misguided. It creates bureaucracies — TTO offices and centers — to do the job of entrepreneurs. I don’t know if this will lead to success.