Campus Entrepreneurship

Last year I took a great course with Prof. David Hart on Science and Technology Policy. One term that comes up often is National Innovation Systems; basically the resources (physical, financial, institutional, educational, human capital, rules/laws, etc) that a nation has and how they are organized and deployed in support of innovation (typically scientific). The idea is that better, more efficient systems should yield higher growth rates and increases in living standards for national populations (and the world for that matter).

While many entrepreneurs don’t often think about the national innovation systems that they access, much of the technology and science that we make use of in the commercial markets are offshoots of directed policy made by politicians, lobbyists, non-profits, government agencies, venture investors and syndicate leaders, etc.

The latest National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship newsletter shares a great new paper by Block and Keller called “Where do Innovations Come from? Transformations in the U.S. National Innovation System of the US 1976-2006″

The way that new products, services, and technologies emerge has changed, and innovation policies need to change in response to this transformed innovation ecosystem. A new study sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation analyzes forty years of data from R&D Magazine, which has annually ranked its top 100 innovations since 1976. This historical perspective yields some interesting insights. One major finding is that the role of Federal investments in supporting innovations has grown rapidly. Also, collaboration is more important.

It looks like a pretty interesting paper and entrepreneurs should read it. There are some solid findings and its pretty clear that universities, their campuses, and players are a major part of successful national innovation systems.

I chose to go the George Mason’s School of Public Policy to pursue my PhD for three main reasons 1) it offered a flexible part-time program with many interesting fields of study 2) it was a newer, aggressive school that had attracted many top faculty in recent years (Richard Florida, Francis Fukuyama, Zoltan Acs) and 3) and it was in DC, my wife’s hometown, and a vibrant region of power, technology, and culture that allowed the school and its students and instructors to engage in the policy debates of the day.

In entering a school of public policy I was quickly introduced to the field of economic development and the terms Taylorism and Fordism — terms were meant to convey the scientific management of the industrial process and increased efficiency and economic output. (FORD being an early example with its assembly lines) Many also use the terms to describe a system that capitalizes on mass labor in a negative way.

The Collegiate Way blog has an interesting posting about an article in the Atlantic Monthly by a Professor X titled The Basement of the Ivory Tower. Apparently the article basically explains that many colleges just take in students and keep them in, in order to achieve revenues.

From the article by Professor X:

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé. (more…)

Pretty interesting piece in today’s WSJ by Riva Richmond about successful and unsuccessful Facebook applications. At this point, Zuckerberg and Facebook are the kingpins of the campus entrepreneur space. While Gates, Brin, Dell, Smith, and others have far more money and reach, Zuck/Fbook are as hot as a pistol.

Its amazing how many other businesses have formed and are forming around Facebook. A ‘new’ industry or cluster in the way that the iPod opened incredible opportunity to other firms and to customers. Clusters are huge in economic growth theory (see Porter), but they are usually geographically (and industry) centered.

The facebook and ipod clusters center around a specific product/lifestyle. I will have to think about this a bit and whether and how these types of clusters — distributed clusters if you will — differ from more traditional clusters.

From the piece (which is worth reading and is full of great cases and stats) by Richmond:

In May 2007, Facebook Inc. invited software developers to create free software programs that members of the social-networking site could use to entertain and inform each other.

A year later, it’s time to ask: What has worked and what hasn’t?

There’s plenty to pick from. So far, more than 250,000 developers have requested the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s tools for building such applications. And more than 24,000 programs have been created, allowing Facebook users to send each other virtual hugs, share movie picks and play games, among other things. (more…)

Just received a news update that the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative at ASU has awarded another round of seed financing to student entrepreneurs on campus. According to the East Valley Tribune,

Sixteen fledgling businesses operated by Arizona State University students have received a total of $200,000 in grants from the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative to help them become established.

The student-owned enterprises will receive between $2,000 and $20,000 each in seed capital and will be provided office space at SkySong, ASU’s innovation center at McDowell and Scottsdale roads in Scottsdale.

Nearly 150 student entrepreneurs applied for funding this year. Winners were chosen based on an initial application process and a live presentation to a panel of seven judges.

Congratulations to all the campus entrepreneurs at ASU taking part in the Edson program. What a great resource to be taken advantage of and it appears there are plenty at ASU looking to do just that.

Why don’t more schools offer these types of programs? Any thoughts?

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, (more…)

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.

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. (more…)

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. (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.