Campus Entrepreneurship

I received an email from Albert Park, (we linked to his great post on Harvard’s Entrepreunerial Culture). He is holding a get together (with some sponsors) for all Boston-based campus entrepreneurs on May 3. Here is his email:

I’d like to extend an invitation to any of your-student-entrepreneur readers out there to attend UNDERGROUND 2008, a Boston-wide conference for student entrepreneurs, by student entrepreneurs. In an innovation ecosystem that relies on a good chunk of its innovation from academia, it’s time that we students improve support and collaboration amongst our community. Come represent your school and meet future teammates and friends from MIT, Harvard, Babson, BU, Olin, BC, and Tufts.

UNDERGROUND 2008 is being hosted this year at MIT this Saturday, May 3. Directions and agenda have been attached below. If you attend a Boston college and have not received an invitation through a student organization there, then I ask you to forward this invitation to your relevant student groups!

Hope to see you there,
-Albert Park

For full details, directions, and agenda see below… (more…)

The deadline to apply for the UC Davis Green Tech Entrepreneurship Academy has been extended to May 16th. The Academy is for science and technology doctoral students, post-docs, and research faculty. The event will take place over a week in July in Lake Tahoe, NV.

The keynote speaker for the event is going to Armory Lovins. From their press release:

Lovins, who will speak on the evening of July 9, is a world-renowned energy consultant and physicist, as well as an author, speaker, and MacArthur Fellow. In 1979, he co-founded Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, market-oriented, entrepreneurial, nonprofit, nonpartisan “think-and-do tank” that focuses its research on advanced resource productivity and innovative business strategies that lead to “abundance by design.” Lovins is also a member of the Board of Advisors for UC Davis’ Energy Efficiency Center.

Two thoughts come to mind when I read this. Firstly, this is a great example of an institution (UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship) being focused on leveraging entrepreneurship, both across its own campus and onto other campuses. The Academy is only in its second year (campus entrepreneurship is new! remember?), but its program communicates quality and dedication.

Secondly, and more importantly, while the campus institution is prepping the battlefield, it will be up to each individual to take advantage of the opportunity. While I don’t know that much about Lovins (I bought his book Natural Capitalism, but never read it), for many people he is a ‘rock star’ in his field and could teach one a great deal and open many doors. (more…)

I was not able to post anything over the weekend because life got in the way. You see, in addition to blogging as a component of my PhD, I am also a launching a new business and am married with a young child.

My wife works full time as an ER doctor and was working on Sat/Sunday. We are in the process of moving, so I was packing up boxes and moving things around, preparing for the floor repair guys (who arrived this morning at 7 am).

Moreover, the beta site for my startup was given to us on Friday so we were testing it, playing with/learning Joomla and working with the programmers over weekend. While this meant I wasn’t able to post anything or attend the finals of Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition, it had me doing a lot of thinking about life as campus entrepreneur.

One of the early comments that Richard Florida made to me when we discussed the idea of campus entrepreneurship was that I needed to start with a basic typology. What he meant was that the experiences of campus entrepreneurs are so varied that I had to begin categorizing them.

For example, the undergrad selling t-shirts to pay tuition is totally different from the PhD candidate (living on their research assistantship salary) patenting compounds and working with (or without) their school’s TTO group in trying to commercial lab work.

There is also the MBA candidate who teams up with the Law School Prof to launch a consulting firm and the undergrad who builds a cool tool that mushrooms into a billion dollar business (Facebook).

My experiences over the weekend (when I was also supposed to be writing my final paper for my advanced methods course) reminded me that my current experience as a campus entrepreneur is so different from my first two experiences (an internet startup as a full-time MBA student and consulting with some Profs as a PhD candidate) and from those campus entrepreneurs I have been interviewing, researching, and covering.

These varied experiences is what makes researching this topic so interesting, but it is the commonalities that I am looking for that will bring insights into entrepreneurship and economic trends, the university’s role in economic development, and the evolution of learning. All of this will hopefully lead to more effective and productive entrepreneurship, universities, and individuals.

I have a basic typology that I am working on — listing entrepreneurs according to basic characteristics: ie their role on campus (undergrad, grad, prof, staff, alumni); the type of business they are involved in (service, technical, retail); whether technical expertise/institutions of the university play a role (ie labs, TTO, research grants, etc.); whether campus entrepreneurship institutions play a role (ie classes, clubs, business plan contests).

I will publish more on this topic as I get a little further and will post it under my research page. If you have any thoughts or guidance please share. I am also looking for opinions.

Just a reminder that the finals of the 2008 Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition are tomorrow (April 26th). The finals are open to the public from 1-5 pm in the ICC Auditorium on the Georgetown University Campus in DC. I will be blogging live (assuming the wifi works) from the event. Between 4 and 6 finalists will be presenting. See you there.

If you spend any time reading about or studying management, entrepreneurship, or business strategy, you will likely come across the term ‘corporate entrepreneurship.’ While I generally dismiss the term and don’t read much about it, today’s WSJ has an interesting piece on the perpetual beer wars between Budweiser and Miller (think India v. Pakistan) in which writer David Kesmodel describes Miller’s hiring of an Ad Age reporter to run a blog called Brew Blog.

James Arndorfer, the aforementioned reporter, has scooped a number of stories on Budweiser much to the chagrin of Bud execs, marketers, and pr folks. Arndorfer appears to be acting like many entrepreneurs/bloggers — combing public records, pumping his industry network, and relentlessly sniping at the largest player in an industry (Bud controls almost 50% of the market). The headline in the image above is one such example.

Bloggers/entrepreneurs have been doing this for years in order to get around large/established media players in various sectors. Miller is doing the same thing; from the piece:

The corporate marketing battlefield has long been strewn with pithy digs in ads and selective news leaks about others’ business woes. But it’s unusual for a company to go to the trouble of creating its own media arm to grind out news on the competition. While the site lets Miller tweak its famously tight-lipped rival, it also gives the company a platform to take a first crack at spinning industry news.

“They are trying to aggressively go around the gatekeepers” in newsrooms and the trade press, says Stephen Quigley, an associate professor of public relations at Boston University. “It’s something you couldn’t do five years ago,” before the proliferation of blogs. (more…)

Given that we live in an economy driven by knowledge (see Drucker, Florida, or Bell), campuses (where knowledge is created and disseminated) have become vital nodes for economic growth and new venture development.

The actions, individuals, and companies we have seen over the past 50 years and the quickening pace of campus entrepreneurship over the past decade or so confirms this.

This is one of the core reasons that we are investigating campus entrepreneurship: there are lots of smart, talented people in and around campuses - from razor sharp 18 year olds to award winning, socially awkward professors.

A mentioned often on this blog, professors are some of the greatest storehouses of knowledge around universities/campuses and students should view them as such.

In the past 4 years I have worked with professors as advisers (at of U of C) and also as full partners (at GMU). I also have a handful of friends and talked with many research subjects who have partnered with faculty members on new ventures.

Entrepreneur.com has an interesting new piece titled ‘Teachers Pet’ (h/t Kevin Clark of GMU) that offers some insight and examples on students partnering up with professors new ventures. (btw, click the image above to watch Van Halen’s classic Hot for Teacher video) From the piece: (more…)

When I first began thinking about building my new venture, I knew I would need a basic content management system. Two open source tools were recommended by various people — Joomla and Drupal.

We ended up going with Joomla (the dev should be done soon), but I just learned today that Drupal was created by Dries Buytaert when he was in college (at Antwerp) and he continued to work on it while completing his PhD in engineering at Ghent University. His venture backed firm Acquia sells commercial products and services related to Drupal.

His blog looks pretty cool and it becomes quickly apparent that Dries (a native of Belgium) is very sharp and involved in some quite interesting things. BTW, it appears that Google is dumping some programming fellowship money into Drupal development - that must make Dries feel pretty good. (A venture launched by a group of campus entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley supporting a venture startup by a campus entrepreneur in Europe.) Nice!

Next Saturday (April 26th) I will be attending the finals of the Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition. The event is put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Washington-Baltimore and Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. This competition is open to students at any university or college in DC, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Delaware. (Pretty interesting that the Boston based MIT plays a prominent role).

The 20 semi-finalists represent an incredible cross-section of universities and students and is worth checking out. I am really excited to see some of them present this coming weekend. BTW, the finals are open to the public.

GlobalHigherEd has a pretty interesting post on the growth of ‘education cities’ or ‘hotspots’ where multiple global educational institutions and corporations co-locate. The blogs describes this trend:

new globalizing knowledge spaces, especially when multiple institutions (and often firms) from different countries are brought together within one space. These may take the form of a branch/overseas/foreign campus, a joint research centre, or perhaps relatively deep transnational linkage schemes (e.g., joint and dual/double degrees, or international consortia of universities).

The post lists many examples of these ventures. The institutions that I am engaged with have all participated in building and supporting global branches. For example, The University of Chicago Grad School of Business has two foreign campuses (London and Singapore). (more…)

The Maxim like photo is what caught my eye. I admit it. I wanted to know who that ‘hottie’ entrepreneur on the cover was. (She was described as such in the article). I was also interested to know if the article, Ning’s Infinite Ambition, had something to offer in understanding social networking and social networking websites.

Anyone who is following campus entrepreneurs has likely noticed the amount of new ventures that have social networks at the core of their business — Facebook, Collegetonite.com, Skoogo.com, etc.

I read through the piece by Adam L. Penenberg and came away feeling that the picture had been a red herring (remember that internet mag) and the article, which promised to explain a ‘new concept’ called ‘viral expansion loop,’ didn’t tell me much and make me believe Ning.com was anything special. (Ning is to social networks what Tripod was to personal websites)  From the article:

Here’s something you probably don’t know about the Internet: Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a billion-dollar business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will kill for the chance to throw money at you.

The secret is what’s called a “viral expansion loop,” a concept little known outside of Silicon Valley (go ahead, Google it — you won’t find much). It’s a type of engineering alchemy that, done right, almost guarantees a self-replicating, borglike growth: One user becomes two, then four, eight, to a million and beyond. It’s not unlike taking a penny and doubling it daily for 30 days. By the end of a week, you’d have 64 cents; within two weeks, $81.92; by day 30, about $5.4 million. (more…)