Cover Story
Forget Seattle and San Jose. The real entrepreneurial action these days is on college campuses
It's hot. it's cool. it's now. Interest in entrepreneurship is exploding on campus. At universities on the coasts and just about everywhere in between, new and ambitious courses, programs, and centers dedicated to entrepreneurship are popping up. National Public Radio airs segments on it. Even Rolling Stone magazine devotes pages to it.
Harvard Business School, long known as a gateway to corporate America, last October established a beachhead in the nation's entrepreneurial epicenter, California's Silicon Valley. Harvard cut the ribbon on its California Research Center, in Menlo Park, where a dozen of its professors are already involved in study and writing. But it's not just the marquee schools that see all the action. Ball State University, in Muncie, Ind., and Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, are cosponsoring this year, for the first time, a business-plan contest for their undergraduates, with $15,000 in prize money at stake. "I think we're seeing a wave--actually a tidal wave--of entrepreneurial interest and activity that's starting to envelop schools of business around the country," notes Ball State professor of entrepreneurship Donald F. Kuratko.
With the global economy rewarding speed, innovation, and nimbleness as never before, entrepreneurship has become the driving force of American business. Entrepreneurial energy on campus is only escalating the trend.
Never have students had a greater hunger for entrepreneurship, business-school officials report. Relatively unknown 25 years ago, entrepreneurship is now a subject taught at about 400 universities, according to Karl Vesper, a professor of management at the University of Washington, in Seattle.
Among the oft-cited reasons for the entrepreneurial fervor on campus is one that's reducible to two words: Bill Gates. The nerdy Harvard College dropout is a modern-day icon for hundreds of thousands of students who imagine that they can emulate the founder of Microsoft Corp. and get filthy rich doing so.
Alumni dollars are also fueling the entrepreneurial boom on campus. One example: A billboard mogul, Karl Eller, and his wife, Stevie, last year kicked in $10 million to the University of Arizona to endow the Karl Eller Center for the Study of the Private Market Economy, among other things. Other examples abound.
And what, after all, is the value for students in this burst of activity? Is a Harvard M.B.A. student concentrating in entrepreneurship, who must spend about $90,000 for a degree, any closer than anybody else to founding the next Microsoft? The experts disagree. But what's abundantly evident is the intensity surrounding entrepreneurship that's pervading American campuses in the here and now.
BIZ-PLAN CONTESTS
CROSS-MARKETING
STUDENTS AS INVESTMENTS
HELP OUT OF HOCK
When it comes to supporting entrepreneurship, Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management puts its money where its mouth is. The school will repay student loans of up to $25,000--$5,000 for five years--for M.B.A. graduates who start their own businesses or work, to some degree, in exchange for stock rather than salary at high-growth companies. "We don't want students' debts to stop them from becoming entrepreneurs," says David BenDaniel, Berens Professor of Entrepreneurship. Seventeen graduates have taken advantage of the university's largesse in the two years since the program was instituted.
STUDENT MONEY IS GREEN, TOO
To purchase more than 1,000 acres of land to grow cranberries, Millennium Cranberry, in Madison, Wis., sought venture-capital financing last spring from a new source in town: university students. They are M.B.A. candidates in the Weinert Applied Ventures Program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who work in teams with local companies and follow up by making financing recommendations to a board of directors. After performing due diligence into the circumstances of Millennium Cranberry, the group invested $50,000 for a favorable equity stake. The money comes from a $750,000 fund recently contributed by entrepreneur Jim Weinert, CEO of Tri Pro Inc., a venture-capital firm in Minneapolis.
TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE
Professor Robert Hisrich's teachings in entrepreneurship are in demand not only at Case Western Reserve University but also much farther afield. In 1992, while he was working as a consultant in Moscow, Hisrich bumped into some Russian academics, and discussions with them led him to start a business-and-entrepreneurship-studies program for engineers there. The five-year-old program for 40 students, offered by Zelenograd Business College, in conjunction with Miett University, is now fully subscribed and is recognized by the Russian Ministry of Education. Hisrich teaches a course at the college every year.
