ENTREPRENEURIAL MISSION
Students at Brigham Young University are known for their missionary work, and last spring two of them were in the former Soviet Republic of Belarus spreading the gospel--the gospel according to Adam Smith, that is. The two students and a professor, Kristie Seawright, spent two weeks last May at the Belorussian State Economics University, in Minsk, teaching some 250 students about entrepreneurship and free enterprise. "I think we made them aware that there are opportunities to start your own business over there," says finance major Justin Stratton, 23, one of the two students.
DOLLARS SPEAK LOUDEST
Businesspeople have been chipping in to universities to promote entrepreneurship. Among recent examples:
- Entrepreneur Gerrald McGinnis, founder of Respironics Inc., last year donated $1.5 million to Carnegie Mellon University's Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, in his hometown of Pittsburgh. The purpose: to endow adjunct professorships for local entrepreneurs who will bring their real-world experience to students.
- Arthur M. Blank, founder of the Home Depot Inc., is shelling out $5 million to promote entrepreneurship at his alma mater, Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass. Most of the money will create an endowment for the entrepreneurial-studies program at the new Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship.
- A $1.5-million gift two years ago from venture capitalist John Pappajohn, who grew up in Mason City, Iowa, helped fund the University of Iowa's recently created John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center. Most of the money will allow engineering and health-sciences students to study entrepreneurship alongside business students.
ASSIGNMENT: THE INNER CITY
When Jonathan Cohn, 30, enrolled in business school, three years ago, he expected to bury himself in an accounting textbook; it never crossed his mind that he might have to consult an accountant about a real-life problem as part of his homework. But he did. Cohn's assignment: to assist Carol Howell, CEO of Howell Construction Co., the general-contracting company in downtown Kansas City she had founded in 1989.
Cohn was attending the Henry W. Bloch School of Business and Public Administration at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Since 1995 the school has encouraged all its M.B.A. candidates to do unpaid fieldwork as consultants for local companies. But two years ago it added a twist for executive-M.B.A. students like Cohn. They are now assigned to do fieldwork with inner-city companies, mostly small businesses.
That wrinkle stems from the university's participation in the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, which Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School founded in 1994 "to make a material change in the economic prospects of our core inner cities," as he put it recently. Now 12 business schools have joined Porter's program, and he expects dozens more.
As a consequence, many more regular and executive-M.B.A. students are plunging into entrepreneurship firsthand. And Cohn has become an advocate of the inner city as a business venue. His family's 75-year-old property-management company, Yarco Co., had seriously considered moving its headquarters to the suburb of Overland Park but instead relocated within the inner-city neighborhood it's called home for more than 30 years. -- Mike Hofman, with research assistance provided by Shane McLaughlin
ASPIRING ENTREPRENEURS IN IOWA
The University of Iowa sponsors a free summer camp for budding entrepreneurs--and "budding" is definitely the word. Each July the university's Summer Institute for the EntrePrep introduces 25 high school juniors to entrepreneurship. When the students return home from the campus, in Iowa City, they spend a year in a small-business internship and earn a $1,000 college scholarship. The year-old program, which attracts three to four applicants for every spot, will be expanded to eight other Iowa campuses by 1999.
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY HATCHERY
So his students can rub elbows with entrepreneurs, Washington University professor Russell Roberts founded the Hatchery in 1996. Students write business plans, for themselves as well as for outside entrepreneurs, with the help of mentors drafted from the business community. An advisory board of investors and entrepreneurs screens the ideas and evaluates the written plans. In one case, the payoff exceeded all expectations: several members of the board so liked senior Andrew Rubin's proposed start-up, Ice King, that they invested $50,000 in his plan to open a string of upscale snow-cone stands in shopping malls.
LOOKING BACK AT CAMPUS INC.
1946: Harvard Business School, in Cambridge, Mass., offers a course in entrepreneurship called Management of New Enterprises, considered by many to be the first of its kind at any U.S. university.
1963: The Journal of Small Business Management, one of the first U.S. academic journals devoted to entrepreneurship, is published in Washington, D.C.
1963: Georgia State University, in Atlanta, creates the country's first endowed professorship in entrepreneurial studies, the Ramsey Chair of Private Enterprise.
1971: University of Southern California becomes one of the first universities to allow students to major in entrepreneurship.
1979: The number of U.S. colleges and universities offering one or more courses in entrepreneurship reaches 150.
1997: An estimated 400 four-year colleges and 600 community colleges offer at least one course in entrepreneurship.
