Campus Entrepreneurship

When it comes to bplan comps, we almost always hear about the winners. This is good old selection bias. Tiffany Petrosino over at the Yale Daily News has a great piece on some Yale entrepreneurs who lost in the Yale Entrepreneurial Society Competition.

After losing in the competition,

Robert Henehan ’10 and Vincent McPhillip ’10 did not give up on their dream of building a T-shirt design company. Instead, they took their business proposal to another group — the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute — an institutional organization designed to support new student ventures and help keep them in the area. A month later, McPhillip said, they had procured a $5,000 living stipend through the YEI Summer Fellowship Program to stay in New Haven over the summer to develop the Catalyst Company, their startup T-shirt design company. (more…)

Early in ‘08 we blogged about Belmont University being named the ‘model’ undergrad entrepreneurship program in the US. Donna Fenn has written about Belmont over at Inc.com. From her piece,

The school has three “hatcheries” or incubators, where 65 students operate businesses with access to mentors and business center services. Belmont has also invested several hundred thousand dollars in six on-campus student-run businesses, five of which are in the black. There’s a dorm store, a public relations firm, an audio production company, a graphic design shop, and a clothing store that serve not only the university but the greater Nashville community

What does your school offer for entrepreneurs? Does your school push you to be an entrepreneur, either on campus or after graduation? Its not uncommon for school leaders to be unsure how to make this change in mindset. As Fenn continues,

All of this, of course, is wildly different from the way entrepreneurship was taught even as recently 5-10 years ago. Far fewer undergrads studied entrepreneurship and those who did were typically bogged down in theory and core requirements until junior year. Now, says Jeff Cornwall, who runs the program at Belmont, “it’s a whole new world.” Fully 40% of undergrads come to Belmont with businesses already started – an astounding number. “

The other day we posted on the 50K bplan contest taking place up north in Minnesota. Today we found an interesting post from John Moravec at Education Futures in which he looks into the lack of entrepreneurial drive at the Univ. of Minnesota. He raises a lot of good questions about what role entrepreneurship plays at world class universities.

In a world where economic growth is driven by intellectual horsepower, the university, naturally, has enormous potential. History and the evolution of capitalism has brought us to the point where entrepreneurship is the best mechanism for unleashing the power of intellectual capital.

If university leaders (including admins & academics) don’t take this seriously and view entrepreneurship as a tool to distribute their discoveries and ideas rather than a crass commercial activity they will find their institutions weakening and being left behind. Just my 2 cents.