Yesterday at the Mason Entrepreneurship Research Conference we had some great sidebar conversations with various presenters and speakers including Tim Berry, Tyler Watts (from GMU Econ), and others.
During one discussion, I was reminded of a scene from the movie “Back to School” with Rodney Dangerfield (1 of my top 5 comedies of all time) where Dangerfield, playing self-made millionaire/owner of Thornton Mellon’s Tall and Fat Mans Stores, is not happy when his Professor begins a ‘business planning’ exercise in class. The scenario is unrealistic in his opinion.
I think this video should be required viewing for all entrepreneurship professors, students, administrators, and policy makers. Enjoy! Warning — this movie was made in 1986 so there is some politically incorrect humor in this and other scenes.
Just listened to Tim Berry give the keynote address during lunch. Tim was great and it is obvious why Palo Alto Software has been so successful and why his writing is so insightful. His presentation was full of great stories, but more importantly, there were lots of great questions that entrepreneurs, policy makers, and others have to ask. Most importantly, are we measuring our costs properly when we look at our biz and how do we bring the long-term into our decision making — btw, both questions are about sustainability.
Just listened to a fascinating talk on cybercrime and business models of cybercriminals. Pretty interesting. The speaker was Nir Kshetri of UNC-Greensboro.
Now we are listeing to Giles Jackson offering a case study of CO2Kills.org — a social venture he runs. He is a Professor of marketing at Shenandoah University. His research is on the use of metaphors in marketing — something that CO2Kills.org uses in marketing.
Don’t think I really agree with this Kelly Holland article from the NY Times asking whether it is time to retrain business schools? (h/t Jim Wolfe). This reexamination comes in the wake of the slowdown/AIG, etc.
No mention of the rise of entrepreneurship, social enterprise, triple bottom lines, or any of the other trends trends running counter to their article’s negativity about bschool. Also, no mention of the fact that booms, busts, swindles, and scams occurred before ‘business education’. Worth reading though.
This Friday, March 27, 2009, is the Mason Entrepreneurship Research Conference. I presented a few years back on Social Capital and Business Plan Contests and will be presenting this week on The Frontier in US History, The Modern Campus, and Entrepreneurship. Last year I posted from the event a few times. Our friend Tim Berry is the key note speaker.
Here is some background on the conference and its mission. Interestingly, it is a joint venture between the School of Public Policy and the School of Management.
Check out this new venture from Yale campus entrepreneur Bob Casey. YouRenew.com provides an opportunity for people to sell their old personal electronics (recycle) and get paid. With so many old cell phones, mp3 players, digital cameras, and smart phones around, this is a huge market opportunity. With such an appetite for electronics in and around the campus, it is not suprise that YouRenew came from students at Yale.
I look forward to learning more from Bob about his firm and about how Yale University has granted him sabbatical to go after this opportunity as part of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute’s Incubator.
David A. Price at the WSJ reviews the autobiography of Terracycle founder Tom Szaky. He is a clear favorite in social entrepreneurship circles and it looks like he is a guy worth getting to know. Pretty interesting stuff. From the review:
One of the more colorful of these is Tom Szaky, the 27-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Trenton, N.J.-based TerraCycle. At $8 million in revenue in 2008 — on sales of household items like bathroom cleaners, notebooks and plant food — his company is minuscule by the standards of the consumer-products industry. Nonetheless, TerraCycle’s story should get many an executive’s mental gears turning. It’s not every dorm-room operation that grows to the point of selling its products through Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Target. Rarer still is the company that makes its products entirely from waste: reused plastic bottles, empty juice pouches and, not least, vermicompost fertilizer — also known as worm castings but better known as worm poop.
“A maverick with a big idea can go further in America than in any other country,” the Hungarian-born, Canadian-raised Mr. Szaky proclaims in “Revolution in a Bottle,” his account of TerraCycle’s story. His original big idea, with which he started TerraCycle at the end of his freshman year at Princeton, was to compete with landfills by feeding food waste to an army of worms. He took delivery on a million red wrigglers and set them to work on garbage that one of the university’s dining halls had allowed him to cart away.
BTW, are you surprised that Szaky attended Princeton?
Read the article and decide for yourself. The piece, by Babson College President Leonard Shlesinger and former New Hampshire Governor Craig Benson, highlights campus entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs, but I am not quite sold. Here is a snippet:
The stimulus bill just signed into law is an example of his entrepreneurial approach. Those on both the left and right criticized the bill as being inadequate or wrong for the economic crisis the nation is facing. Depending on your view, there were either too few or too many tax cuts, and too much or too little spending.
The president’s response was candid and straightforward. To paraphrase, he said that we don’t know how much money it will take to turn around the economy and which parts of the bill will work best, but we do know that we have to get started.
That is the response of an entrepreneur: Make a decision, get ready to make the next decision and continue to make decisions with what information is available. In the face of extreme uncertainty when no one, including our best economists, knows what the perfect solution is, the right approach is to take action, create new opportunities and move to the next decision.
What’s important is to keep moving in the right direction. Entrepreneurs do not wait for the ideal solutions to emerge because they know that sometimes, as they act, solutions will emerge from the unlikeliest of places.
Great article full of data from the annual Dept of Ed report on size and composition of higher education industry in the U.S. There are opportunities everywhere and clearly campus entrepreneurs are taking part. From the piece by Doug Lederman
According to the report, colleges and universities that qualify to award federal financial aid enrolled nearly 18.7 million students in fall 2007, up about 2.6 percent from 2006 and about 5.42 percent since 2004’s total of 17.7 million.
Enrollment at publicly supported institutions grew by 2.4 percent from 2006 to 2007, enrollment at private nonprofit colleges increased by 1.5 percent, and enrollment at private for-profit colleges rose by 7.22 percent. For-profit institutions have maintained that pace over a three year period, and since 2004, their share of all enrollments grew to 7.9 percent of the total college population, up from 6.7 percent.
The entire article underscores the size and scope of the higher education marketplace in the US. With Obama’s call for all Americans to spend at least a yr in college still ‘out there’ and the trends in the report, the campus continues to present opportunities for entrepreneurs of all types.
Deadline for “class” at Launchbox Digital (a DC based venture accelerator) is March 16. Check it out. Thrown in an app and tae a shot. Might as well in this economy? Seriously though, they are dong some cool things.
Also, they just signed a partnership with and took an investment from wireless firm ACTA. More campuses need accelerator programs for students.
