Campus Entrepreneurship

Today I hauled myself out to the main campus of George Mason (in Fairfax Virginia). What got me to battle the beltway? My friend and colleague Sameeksha Desai was defending her dissertation.

She is a serious and innovative researcher who I have blogged about in the the past. Her work covers post conflict entrepreneurship (think Rwanda, etc) and begins to define/explore a concept called ‘destructive entrepreneurship.’

This term appears to come from Baumol’s 1990 work, Good Entrepreneurship, Bad Entrepreneurship, and Destructive Entrepreneurship. While Baumol didn’t delve to deeply into the destructive, Samee has!

Destructive entrepreneurship is anything that destroys economic capacity; whether it be land, labor, or capital.

So, for example, in an unstable post-conflict environment entrepreneurs will make decisions that are often short-term in nature (b/c the future is very unclear) but cost the economy greatly in the long run. The policy implications of this were discussed in Samee’s work.

While her work focuses on post-conflict entrepreneurship, the destructive nature of much of it is similar to what we see in many urban cores in the US. This idea was discussed extensively after Samee’s presentation and its clear that her work can shed a lot of light on traditional urban issues.

Her work is fascinating and I am trying to find some things to post.

Given that we live in an economy driven by knowledge (see Drucker, Florida, or Bell), campuses (where knowledge is created and disseminated) have become vital nodes for economic growth and new venture development.

The actions, individuals, and companies we have seen over the past 50 years and the quickening pace of campus entrepreneurship over the past decade or so confirms this.

This is one of the core reasons that we are investigating campus entrepreneurship: there are lots of smart, talented people in and around campuses - from razor sharp 18 year olds to award winning, socially awkward professors.

A mentioned often on this blog, professors are some of the greatest storehouses of knowledge around universities/campuses and students should view them as such.

In the past 4 years I have worked with professors as advisers (at of U of C) and also as full partners (at GMU). I also have a handful of friends and talked with many research subjects who have partnered with faculty members on new ventures.

Entrepreneur.com has an interesting new piece titled ‘Teachers Pet’ (h/t Kevin Clark of GMU) that offers some insight and examples on students partnering up with professors new ventures. (btw, click the image above to watch Van Halen’s classic Hot for Teacher video) From the piece: (more…)

WSJ writer Rebecca Buckman has an interesting piece on the special relationship that exists between a leading MIT Scientist (Robert Langer) and a leading venture capitalist (Terry McGuire). The two have launched 13 firms together over the past 15 years.

In looking at the continuum of campus entrepreneurs, PhD’s like Robert Langer are at the extreme — high technical/academic knowledge. While few of us will ever achieve ’superstar’ scientist status, their work offers great opportunities for those of us closer to the campus mean (MBAs, undergrads, social scientists, research assistants, etc.). As the article referenced notes, McGuire ‘cold called’ Langer one day after reading about his research.

From the WSJ article,

Together, Messrs. McGuire and Langer have launched 13 companies over the past 15 years and become a model for other venture capitalists scrambling to commercialize new drug and medical-device research. Dr. Langer, 59 years old, holds more than 600 patents and supplies the science; Mr. McGuire, 52, fine-tunes the business. Some of Mr. McGuire’s work with Mr. Langer was described in a 2005 Harvard Business School case study called, “The Langer Lab: Commercializing Science.”

Other serial “academic entrepreneurs” have teamed up with VCs to launch bioscience companies. They include Harvard professor George Whitesides, who helped start biotech giant Genzyme Corp. and drug company Theravance Inc., and Stanford ophthalmologist Mark Blumenkranz, whose research helped launch OptiMedica Corp., which is developing new technology to treat eye disease. Dr. Blumenkranz joined with venture capitalist Brook Byers on OptiMedica, and “we’re working on another project together,” says Mr. Byers, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But few venture capitalists have been as successful as Mr. McGuire in cultivating one scientist as a source of deals.

The other day we posted on the 50K bplan contest taking place up north in Minnesota. Today we found an interesting post from John Moravec at Education Futures in which he looks into the lack of entrepreneurial drive at the Univ. of Minnesota. He raises a lot of good questions about what role entrepreneurship plays at world class universities.

In a world where economic growth is driven by intellectual horsepower, the university, naturally, has enormous potential. History and the evolution of capitalism has brought us to the point where entrepreneurship is the best mechanism for unleashing the power of intellectual capital.

If university leaders (including admins & academics) don’t take this seriously and view entrepreneurship as a tool to distribute their discoveries and ideas rather than a crass commercial activity they will find their institutions weakening and being left behind. Just my 2 cents.

11:42 AM (MERC) Sameeksha Desai is presenting on a Theory of Destructive Entrepreneurship. This is an investigation into the ‘entrepreneurial growth policies’ that are often put into place in 3rd world and conflict torn countries — trying to formalize their economies. So what role does entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship policies play in post-conflict societies.

Really a nice change of pace, and an interesting topic that not many in the entrepreneurship space pay much attention to — how can entrepreneurship be a bad thing for society?

Found this cool campus entrepreneur over at Vator.tv. HubDub.com is a site that lets you try to predict the news. Fun, casual gaming involving news forecasting. Great video from the AP on the company. The CEO is Nigel Eccles and he appears to be working with the Edinburgh Technology Transfer Centre.

Over the past few weeks I have been having some great conversations about social entrepreneurship with Zoltan Acs, Prof. at GMU. The area is seeing a lot of activity and research inquiry. The question of what social entrepreneurship is, is far from being answered. (Acs answer is different from the one below)

Below is an excerpt from Tina Seelig’s CreativityRulz Blog. Seelig is the executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program at Stanford University School of Engineering (a legendary institution in campus entrepreneurship).

So, what differentiates a social entrepreneur from a plain old vanilla entrepreneur? I must stay that it isn’t clear to me…. To loosely quote Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, when he spoke at Stanford last year, “all entrepreneurship is ’social’ because at a minimum it generates jobs and stimulates the economy.” Given that as a baseline, companies can be socially responsible in an endless number of ways. If a company has family friendly policies, it is socially responsible. If a company recycles used materials and installs solar panels on the roof, it is socially responsible. If a company makes medical products that save lives, it socially responsible. If a company makes energy efficient cars, it is socially responsible. A company certainly does not have to be a not-for-profit to be socially responsible.

I would argue that people use the word “social” entrepreneurship because they don’t always know what entrepreneurship is… The way we teach it, entrepreneurship is about identifying problems and solving them by leveraging scarce resources. It means creating value, where value can be measured in a wide range of ways. It is extremely limiting is you define value only as making lots of money.

Cruised by the Kauffman Foundation and noticed their list of most downloaded entrepreneurship papers of 2007. Lots of cool categories and some interesting sounding papers. The Entrepreneurship Research and Policy Network (ERPN) is a growing and valuable resource that shows the breadth of work going on in the entrepreneurship space.

According to their press release, “Since its inception in March 2006 the ERPN has grown significantly, now consisting of more than 4,300 papers with a combined total of more than 521,000 downloads.” Knowledge is flowing — a good thing for the entrepreneurship in general, students, faculty, and the economy.

Here are a few of the most downloaded:

From my friend David Kirsch (at University of Maryland) and some colleagues (yes one of their names is David A. Miller): Was There Too Little Entry During the Dot Com Era?

Betsey Book, an independent researcher/writer, has a paper titled: Virtual World Business Brands: Entrepreneurship and Identity in Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming Environments.

A paper by Vivek Wadhwa, that I have used quite frequently in my work with Richard Florida and the Creative Class Group, was the most downloaded in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Growth section: Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part III.

  Last week, while traveling, I had the opportunity to read John Steele Gordon’s, An Empire of Wealth. The book is a sweeping economic history of the US, from pre-colonial times through the internet. Really a great read.

Turns out the entire petroleum industry was created by a group of campus entrepreneurs in and around Darmouth and Yale. These are old skool campus entrepreneurs!

From p. 169 of An Empire of Wealth; An Epic History of American Economic Power,

In 1853 a Dartmouth College graduate named George Bisell (picture above) happened to be visiting his old school when he saw in a professor’s office a bottle of rock oil that had come from western Pennsylvania. He knew that the stuff was flammable and suddenly conceived of the idea that it could be turned into an illuminant. He organized a small group of investors and asked one of the country’s leading chemists, Professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr., of Yale, to look into the possibilities. Silliman reported that the rock oil could easily be fractioned into various substances, including kerosene, by heating it.

The book goes on to discuss the ephinany that lead to Bissell’s employment of a derrick for drilling and eventually (27 August 1859) to the world’s first oil well in Titusville, PA.

Here are the wikipedia links to Bissell, Silliman, and Edwin Drake (the man hired by Bissell to drill for oil in Titusville and thus the first human to strike oil).

I began researching the subject of campus entrepreneurship for two reasons; 1) entrepreneurs and their ideas (especially campus entrepreneurs) are fascinating and fun to learn about and 2) my belief (based on observed behavior of campus entrepreneurs) that the campus offers many assets and institutions that can be leveraged by entrepreneurs for advantage.

Some school leaders agree with my second reason and are starting to organize to assist campus entrepreneurs (see ASU for example). This blog was recently introduced to the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and its Yale Startups website. From their mission:

While Yale has long been known for new company startups arising out of University research and faculty ideas, it has now increased its efforts to systematically encourage and promote the ideas of its student population, including events and programs that address best practices in the fundamentals of new venture formation.

Here is a list of some of their student ventures.