Campus Entrepreneurship

Just found out about The Next Tycoon — a reality show business competition that will be filming in Atlanta in August and will air in September. (the name is a little ‘Trumpish’ for me, but I am just one)

The show/contest is being produced by an Atlanta-based entrepreneur, W. Cliff Oxford whose firm spent three years on the Inc. 500 list. (he also endows the Executive MBA program at Emory’s Goizueta School of Business.) From the article at Marketwatch.com:

The Next Tycoon is a new reality show that will give entrepreneurs from all ages and backgrounds a chance to present their business ideas to key decision makers and outstanding business and media leaders. The show will be a valuable educational resource as well as a fun opportunity for all participants to share and discuss new, exciting business plans…

While the competition is based and will be filmed in Atlanta, it isn’t limited to the region. Anyone who applies through the Web site, www.thenexttycoon.biz, is eligible as long as he or she has a plan for a viable business venture to present onsite.

It appears there is an $85 fee to apply, but that sounds more like a weeder fee more than anything else. This is another example of the various models and actors experimenting and extending the business plan competition.

Check out the site, there are some interesting things in there. For example, there will be at least 100 people presenting in preliminary rounds and they are not allowed to use ppt. Information on participating can be found here. Let us know if you apply.

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?

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.

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…)

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. (more…)

I think this is the first time I have seen a team of Executive MBA Students win a business plan competition. According to a report on VUCast (Vanderbilt’s University Network), a team of executive MBA students from the Owen Graduate School of Management, won the Jungle Business Plan Challenge.

Check out the members of this team (remember this is an exec MBA program, meaning these people are usually older than typical MBA candidates and likely earning the degree to improve performance at their current job):

The team developed a proposal for a start-up company, Organ Transplant Technology, to market a new method for preserving and transporting donor organs. The company would combine a newly developed perfusion solution for preserving transplanted organs with a transportable compressed-air driven perfusion system to replace the currently used method of transporting organs on ice in coolers.

Members of the winning team, all of whom graduate May 9 from Vanderbilt’s Executive MBA program, are Dr. Ravi Chari, professor of surgery and cancer biology and chief of the division of hepatobiliary surgery and liver transplantation at Vanderbilt; Ted Klee, vice president of Square D/Schneider Electric Company; Andrew Bordas, director, warehouse management systems, Ingram Book; and Fernando Sanchez, chief financial officer of Gibson Guitar. Clayton Knox, a Vanderbilt medical student, also assisted the team with the project.

A doctor (cancer surgeon/dept. head at Vandy) and the freakin’ CFO of Gibson Guitar? Thats krazy. That being said, as I think about this competition and the winner, I wonder, should people enter business plan competition is they have no intention of launching the idea/firm that they enter into the competition.

I don’t know if the team above is going to move forward with their organ transplant firm, but given their full time jobs (exec MBAs are on campus even less than part-times) I can only assume they are sticking with their day jobs.

Was it a mistake for the judges to give them top prize? Is this unfair to those who entered the competition and wanted to actually launch their firms?

I think the act of participating in the competition and exploring and sharing an idea and approach is valuable for both the participants, judges, and audience. If people are annoyed that some winners/entrants have no intention of launching their entries, then those annoyed people have to beat them in the competitions.

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…)

Administrators and Professors are still exhibiting a wide variety of reactions to the growth in campus entrepreneurship. Andrzej Zwaniecki of America.gov wrote a nice piece on the rise of entrepreneurship on US campuses.

The piece offers some interesting insights and coverage of the growth of entrepreneurship and institutions on MITs campus over the past decade or so. What this confirms is that even for a school like MIT, (huge technical talent,  international prominence, and located in a hotbed of startup activity/financing), active entrepreneurship on campus is still a relatively new phenomenon. While there are many schools with fewer assets to begin with, entrepreneurship on campus,  just like entrepreneurship in general, demands innovation and often favors the small, less inhibited actor.

From the article,

In the past, entrepreneurship programs were available only to business school students. This started to change in the 1990s when educators realized that students in science, engineering and other disciplines had to have entrepreneurship and leadership skills to succeed in a rapidly changing world. (more…)

Found this really cool article by Albert Park over at Xconomy.com in which he (an MIT student) goes over and observes the entrepreneurial culture at local rival Harvard. When I think of Harvard entrepreneurs I think of Gates and Zuckerberg.

Parks does kind of a mini-ethnography and lays out some of the driving institutions in Harvard’s current entrepreneurial landscape. From the piece:

The most active entrepreneurship group at Harvard is the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum (HCEF), now in its second year. While there have been several instances of other student entrepreneurship clubs at Harvard, they have all died with the original founders. Entrepreneurship forum co-presidents Travis May and Michael Segal still face this issue of group sustainability. But they have rallied an impressive group of students. Recent noteworthy events include talks by entrepreneurship journalist Scott Kirsner, Emerge founder/MIT student Alia Whitney-Johnson, and Bessemer Venture Partner/HBS Professor Felda Hardymon. It is interesting to note that these events pull in not only Harvard students, but also MIT, BU, Babson, and BC representatives.

The i3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge, which the HCEF is organizing, along with the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and Harvard Student Agencies, is a business plan competition in its first year that offers up a very respectable $32.5K in prize money. The competition is divided into tracks, akin to the MIT $100K Competition, with categories for for-profit ventures, social entrepreneurship, creative non-business ventures, and campus services.

I find the entrepreneurship club data/observation pretty fascinating and wonder what it tells us about entrepreneurs, students, faculty, and administrators. Is this a Harvard phenom?

Just read an interesting story by Kimberly Cornuelle covering BU’s Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (ITEC) competition. In this competition, there will be real time voting for finalists by audience members. While it doesn’t appear that these votes are not counted in a specific way, according to the article, the judges will take audience votes into account.

While the decision of the judges — a panel of venture capitalists and business leaders — will not be based solely on the number of votes, Goldstein says votes in favor of a particular team can only help. “The judges will definitely take the votes into consideration,” she says. “They will be looking at the actual plan proposed, how the finalists articulated their goals, plus the audience votes.”

This is an twist in determining the winners of a competition that I had not seen before. The business plan competiton has come a long way from its birth at the University of Texas. And it is good to see that different competitions are trying different techniques to expand the reach of business plan competitions.

As discussed previously, we have seen social venture competitions, corporate sponsored competitions, media led efforts, economic development competitions (ie Gov’s Contest in Wisconsin), market based competitions (ie the Boomer Contest), and online contests (ie Vator.tv, StartupNation). This latest innovation is cool because it brings the audience into the contests and presumbly asks them to consider the viability and growth potential of the firms presenting. Ideally this helps spread ‘the gospel’ and ‘ideals’ of entrepreneurship.

From the article,

The final projects are AutoNAIS, which proposes a new product that helps biologists save time and effort with sample preparation; RemesaTel, which hopes to provide inexpensive access to credit and trading opportunities through mobile text messaging in Mexico; Nakama Media, which will sell its online multimedia language learning tool MediaLesson in Japan and Korea, and Essense Medical, which develops disposable medical tools, initially focused on colorectal cancer, to diagnose and treat cancer in real time. (more…)