(Campus) Entrepreneurship: The Next Frontier?

Early this semester (way back in January) I met with Zoltan Acs to lay out  a directed reading (independent study) in Entrepreneurship that I am completing. Zoltan recommended that I look at Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis on the US and see if it might fit with my research on Campus Entrepreneurship

Looks like we are not the only people making use of Turner’s ideas. On May 19, Michael S. Malone wrote an Op-Ed in the WSJ titled, “The Next American Frontier.” He too was using Turner’s ideas to offer an alternative way of understanding the rise of entrepreneurship in the US. It is a great piece.

Below is excerpt from Malone, below that is a pdf version of a ppt that I presented to my other class this semester (Advanced Qualitative Methods with Janine Wedel) in mid-April.

For three centuries the frontier had defined us, tantalized us with the perpetual chance to “light out for the territories” and start our lives over. It was the foundation of those very American notions of “federalism” and “rugged individualism.” But Americans had crossed an invisible line in history, entering a new world with a new set of rules.

What Turner couldn’t guess was that the unexplored prairie would become the uninvented new product, the unexploited new market and the untried new business plan.

The great new American frontiers proved to be those of business, science and technology.

Here is the newfrontier PPT that I presented in class. (it is broader than just Turner, but he gets some coverage — his money quote below from 1893)

Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.

As my PPT highlights, I believe the campus is the new frontier for the US; the campus is continuing to be and will more and more become the locus of innovation and entrepreneurship in the US.

StudentBusinesses.com Member Profiles — EasyBib & Think Gum

Our friends over at StudentBusinesses.com have started a new, weekly feature on their blog — a column profiling some of the great businesses and entrepreneurs that they have as part of their site. Below is an excerpt from their inaugural column. It features two new ventures, ThinkGum LLC and EasyBib.

Founded by a PhD candidate at Stanford Medical School, Think Gum LLC has created a chewing gum that they believe can improve your energy level and enhance your memory:

Think Gum LLC is a wholesale chewing gum company that supplies its customers with chewing gum designed to boost mental performance. The candy-coated, sugar-free chewing gum is flavored and scented with rosemary, peppermint and other brain-boosting herbs and herbal extracts.

As you write your next paper with the help of some Think Gum, you may also want to turn to EasyBib, a startup founded by two students who were in high school at the time (who subsequently attended Northwestern and Brown):

EasyBib.com was developed in 2001 as a solution to expedite the bibliographic process. Students enter information and EasyBib formats that data into a works cited list ready to print. Today, EasyBib is the number one software in its niche. Searching “bibliography” in Google will return EasyBib as the number one result. EasyBib receives over 20 million page views monthly during the school year, and is used by the majority of students throughout the US.

EasyBib’s current popularity and search engine position are great, but their biggest asset is an extremely useful and simple product that caters to a large niche.

We Have our Own Server Now!

CampusEntrepreneurship.com is now hosted on its own server. We will continue to post to http://CampusEntrepreneurship.wordpress.com for the near future, but for those using a feed, please check your feeds and redirect them to http://CampusEntrepreneurship.com.

Also, you will notice on the new site, there is an email sign up list. Please sign up for our periodic emails.

Email us with any questions at CampusEntrepreneurship/@/Gmail.com or DMILLERQ /@/GMU.edu.

Global Securty Comp is Back

The $500,000 Global Security Challenge is back for another year after a successful events the last two years. While this is a clearly a niche competition, the market it explores is huge and very important to people with a lot of money (the defense/security establishment).

From the competition’s website:

We seek to uncover the creative capabilities of innovators in universities and infant companies that apply to public security needs. This includes software or hardware solutions that help (a) protect people, critical infrastructure, facilities and data/electronic systems against terrorist or other criminal attacks and natural disasters or (b) help governments, businesses and communities defend against, cope with or recover from such incidents.

Examples of our areas of interest are (but are not limited to) biometrics, detection sensors, network security, data storage, video surveillance, RFID, data-mining SW, biotechnologies, and search software.

My thought as I ponder this competition is how they would respond to ’soft-power’ startups in the media and cultural space. Think Radio Free Europe or other types of security tools that have been employed over the years to try to strengthen security for the US and its allies?

Entry is open until June 15. Semifinals will be held in September in DC, Brussels, and Singapore.

Artistic Entrepreneurs on Campus

A group of campus entrepreneurs that we don’t talk about very frequently are those whose product or services comes from the sector we traditionally call arts and culture. Much of my work with Richard Florida analyzes the intersection of artistic talent/institutions and sustainable economic growth.

Campuses have long been a place where artistic endeavors flourish and often lead the rest of society and the economy. From bands and fashion to food and computer design, campuses are a hotbed of innovation and activity.

I started thinking about this the other day while spending time with my brother in law, Zach. When he was at the University of Wisconsin Madison he founded a record label named Halftooth Records. He spent four years on the business and eventually sold his shares and moved to other pursuits. Here is an old school article from The Badger Herald on Zach, his partner, and their label.

Yet since the 2001 inception of the rising star label Halftooth Records, founding producers David Schrager and Zach Gordon have been attacking them all. From their first encounter in Madison, the record company was an inevitable endeavor. Gordon brought an enthusiasm for a broad range of musical genres and a concern with the current trajectory of the specific hip-hop culture. Schrager was industry-savvy from interning with the likes of Cornerstone Productions and working as a college representative with The Fader magazine.

The culmination of their abilities as producers is first demonstrated in the showcase album You Don’t Know the Half.

Do artists on campus traditionally view their craft as a business? Do they write business plans and marketing plans or raise capital?

WSJ: Harvard Kids Want to Be Like Mark

I was fortunate to grow up in Chicago in the 80s/90s and was even more fortunate that my mom’s business partner’s husband (got that?) was an executive with the Chicago Bulls. We got to go to lots of playoffs games and see the Bull’s win 6 NBA crowns. Everyone in Chicago wanted to ‘Be Like Mike.’

According to Vauhini Vara of the WSJ, lots of people at Harvard now want to ‘Be Like Mark.’ Mark Zuckerberg that is, as in Facebook. Vara has a nice piece that explains that Harvard is new to the entrepreneurship game (compared to MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, etc.) and that Facebook’s explosion has led to a cultural change on campus.

The piece profiles a handful of Harvard campus entrepreneurs and their ventures and explains how the school has had to revisit many policies regarding student run businesses over the past few years. From the piece,

StudentBusinesses.com — Harvard

I had a great conversation with Travis May, one of the founders of StudentBusinesses.com. Travis is currently a junior at Harvard and has been involved with entrepreneurship since entering the school.

Travis and his parter, Vivek G. Ramaswamy, who graduated last June, discovered their shared interest in entrepreneurship while sitting on a bus in china during a spring break trip. (only at Harvard?)

Their site and businesses is dedicated to helping student entrepreneurs network and get feedback from one another as well as interacting with service providers such as investors and law firms.

Their site is worth checking out and joining if you are a student with a business or a service provider looking to get involved with some of the great activities taking place on campuses. From their site,

StudentBusinesses.com is a selective resource that connects the most promising student entrepreneurs in the U.S. with resources to help them succeed. By using the site, promising student entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to (1) publicize their businesses and ideas to potential advisors, investors, and professional service-providers, (2) network with other promising student entrepreneurs, (3) participate in discussions on a wide range of promising startup ideas, and (4) access valuable educational content about entrepreneurship. The site is by-invitation and by-application only in order to ensure a high standard of membership.

Broadly, there are two groups of people who will benefit from using StudentBusinesses.com: (1) entrepreneurial university students, and (2) experienced individuals who seek to access these students. Student members of the site may join “In the Game” if they currently are part of a startup, or they may join “On the Roster” if they are entrepreneurially-minded but are not currently part of a startup. Students may join the site at no cost. Customers of the site will be comprised of experienced professionals, investors, and advisors who seek to tap into the student entrepreneurship community; all customers must fulfill the criteria of accredited investor status. Both students and customers may only join the site if they are invited, or if they apply through the site and are accepted.

I will be posting more on StudentBusinesses.com and will share some of the profiles of some of their members companies. Travis is a smart guy with a great new business targeting a market (campus entrepreneurs) that is only going to continue to grow.

Years ago, after my internet experiences with RollingStone.com and Machineweb.com, I read a lot about the California Gold Rush. I remember seeing a quote somewhere that said the secret to getting rich during the Gold Rush was to “Mine the Miners.” StudentBusinesses.com looks to be doing that while making the ‘miners’ happy, just as ‘49ers’ were happy with their Levi’s jeans and other Harvard students are happy with Facebook.

Behance Network — Harvard Business School

Nice article by Behance Network founder Scott Belsky of Harvard Business School. Its not often that we get first hand accounts from entrepreneurs like this article in the Harbus (the student weekly at Harvard Business School). There is a lot to learn from active campus entrepreneurs like Belsky. Here are some selections from his piece:

Soon after I got accepted to HBS, I left a job at Goldman Sachs with the intention to travel, write, and bask in idea-generation for a few months prior to moving to Boston. Instead, I became obsessed with one idea in particular and inadvertently started a business prior to starting business school. The two years that followed were a roller-coaster of challenges in building a start-up team, developing, launching, and marketing a series of products…and showing up to class on time.

“Behance” was founded after about 100 interviews I conducted with creative teams and individuals – people in large agencies/companies, small design firms, and talented freelancers. I was fascinated by the inefficiencies in the marketplace, notably how Creatives build professional networks and how companies find and hire creative talent. I realized that the creative community was extremely disorganized and inefficient. The problems existed both on a micro-level (low personal productivity and brainstorms were often a waste of time), and a macro-level (people relied on old rolodexes or MySpace pages, and there was no “professional” online platform for Creatives).

The summer before HBS was spent developing an outline of a company that would boost productivity and help organize the creative community. The first few hundred dollars were spent on the trademark “Make Ideas Happen,” and then it started: I was scheduling meetings, and telling enough people about the concept that I suddenly felt accountable! With a small round of funding from friends and family, I hired a Chief of Design to focus full-time on developing the business, just three weeks before I packed my bags for Boston.

Tech Entrepreneurship Not for the Young?

Ben Worthen of the WSJ offers an interesting post on tech entrepreneurship, age, and education. Worthen reports on a recent Kauffman Foundation survey that finds, contrary to popular views, most enginnering & tech firms are founded by older workers. (the report is titled Education & Tech Entrepreneurship). From the post:

Instead, the average tech entrepreneur was 39-years old when the company was founded, says a survey released Thursday by the Kauffman Foundation. The survey asked questions of 652 U.S.-born execs at tech companies started between 1995 and 2005 and with revenues of at least $1 million. Not only was the average founder pushing middle age, but also nearly five times as many founders were over 45 (24%) as were younger than 25 (5%) when their companies got off the ground.

Only 8% of founders hadn’t completed a college degree, contrary to the image of the Bill-Gates-like college dropout. Forty percent had a masters degree or a PhD.

This study confirms many of our suspicions regarding various types of campus entrepreneurship. Our continued development of a typology of campus entrepreneurs will benefit from this study and its definitions of engineering and technology firms.

For campus entrepreneurs that employ advanced technical skills and extensive campus resources (both human and physical) during the opportunity identification and firm development phase, we expect entrepreneurs to be older and hold or being working towards advanced degrees.

Clocky — MIT

I saw entrepreneur Gauri Nanda on Donny Deutsch a long time ago (maybe up to a year ago). While pursuing graduate work at the MIT media lab, Nanda created an alarm clock that would actually get the user up and out of bed.

For some people, this is not a problem, they get up with their alarm or reveille or some other standard waking instrument. For others, like me, and Nanda, perpetual snoozes or sleeping right through an alarm is more the norm.

Nanda created Clocky — an alarm clock that propels itself around room when it ‘goes off’ at the set time. It forces the users to get out of bed in order to hit the snooze button. The assumption being that if one gets out of bed they might stay out.

Watch the video below and see if you hear a little R2D2 in Clocky. Buy it from Nanda Home (her company is now making chrome Clocky’s and some pretty cool laptop bags). YouTube video below.