Campus Entrepreneurship

Mizzou Tiger Cary Silverman has experienced his fair share of ups and downs in launching GradeGenie.com. The goal of the site is to provide an ‘easy way to share class notes, study guides, and other useful class information.’ Seems to make sense. (Here is a story from local Columbia, MO news station KOMU)

Some background on his first launch of GradeGenie.com:

Enlisting the help of his fraternity brothers on the campus of the University of Missouri – Columbia, they blanketed the campus with advertisements for the website designed to allow college students to post their class notes, old papers and old homework online.

“I didn’t really think much of it until I received an urgent phone call from the police chief and adjutant that morning,” noted Cary. “Apparently when the dean of students had to tear hole in the flyers covering the door to his office just to be able to unlock it, that prompted a call to the police chief.”

That was just the beginning. Covering the famous columns on campus with flyers up to 20 feet off the ground, GradeGenie got its first hard lesson in doing business with college administrators. The IT department noticed too, as visitors to the site started pushing limits on the campus servers.

After being told to shutdown or face possible expulsion or legal problems, Cary decided that he needed to learn a few things about doing business within the boundaries of college administration’s rules.

Interesting that questions of launching firms, advertising, and using school IT infrastructure is still confusing to students, administrators, and staff. Universities must get a handle on this and make it clear to campus entrepreneurs what is available to them.

Will short-sided, university administrators continue to ignore the reality of today’s entrepreneurial students and block them out of ignorance and malice?

I was lucky enough to work in Dayton a few months back with the Creative Class Group. They have some great people there and some great universities. Today I found out about a really cool student venture that won the University of Dayton’s Business Plan Competition.

Salud del Sol, an innovative new business from a team of University of Dayton students aimed at bringing the ‘health of the sun’ to medical treatment in developing countries, took home the $10,000 first prize to help get the venture off the ground.

Winning the 2008 University of Dayton Business Plan Competition, the team of Lauren Dokes, Lori Hanna (pictured above), Daniel Hensel and Anna Young created a business plan to developo and market solar cookers and solar-powered sterilizers.

Here is a video interview with Lori Hanna. According to Hanna, b/c many villages in Nicaragua lack electricity, “nurses have to travel to bigger health centers or hospitals to use sterilizers, sometimes traveling long distances by bus and spending precious time and money to have access to equipment.” If they solve this problem I’d imagine they’d be bringing a lot of value to those people in Nicaragua.

I am not sure how much it costs to manufacture solar cookers and sterilizers, but it demands that we delve further into the social entrepreneurship debate. How do we measure social value? While entrepreneurs have always created social value (sometimes negative), we would primarily measure their ventures via income and shareholder value. These new ventures demand new metrics and measures related to social impact or value. Any thoughts?

In honor of the Jayhawks winning the NCAA Basketball Championship we thought we would profile the KU School of Business’ entrepreneurship offerings.

The school offers courses for non-biz undergrads, an undergrad entrepreneurship concentration, and an entrepreneurship and innovation concentration for MBAs and masters of accounting students.

The school also hosts the Mark L. Morris New Venture Development Competition; its open to all undergraduate students at The University of Kansas.

About a month ago we wondered what exactly social entrepreneurship is? It appears the debate continues to rage (h/t SmartSolutionsk12). NYT columnist David Brooks wrote a positive piece on it and popular education blogger Alex Russo came out negatively in response. In one sense, its doesn’t matter what the theoretical argument is, we see campus entrepreneurs that fit the definition of social entrepreneurs more and more often and there doesn’t appear to be an end in site.

From Brooks,

The older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big building administers it.

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

Their problem now is scalability. How do the social entrepreneurs replicate successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national difference?

From Russo,

Basically, what’s being described is a fad. Dressed up as something new and shiny, social entrepreneurship isn’t that different from regular old philanthropy and reform. It works outside the system. It’s generally small-scale. It relies on outside funding. There’s an awfully cozy, clubby feel to it. It doesn’t, far as I’ve ever heard, close down failing efforts or even admit to failures like you’d see in the “real” world of venture capital. It doesn’t really have any big successes, measured in terms of broad and positive impact, in education.

Any thoughts? Is this all just a new fad or is there something different going on with today’s socially oriented entrepreneurs?