Top Gun for Start-Ups

An experimental graduate program at Babson College is designed to carry students to their first start-up.

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An experimental graduate program is designed to carry students to their first start-up

Once upon a time, company founders were born, not made. It was said that entrepreneurs were a special breed, more driven to succeed than the rest of us. It was also said, by such experts as Jeffry Timmons, author of the seminal work The Entrepreneurial Mind (Brick House, 1989), that there was no point in even trying to start a company until you had been in the real work world for years. Maybe by age 40 you would have picked up the 50,000 bits of life learning it takes to deal successfully with the pressures of a start-up.

Boy, has that view changed. "It's ironic, but the times have changed, too," says Stephen Spinelli. "The difference today is that the cost of gaining those 50,000 chunks is so much lower. Back in the old 20th-century days, in 1990, if you went out and failed, it became much harder to get resources and people and the marketplace to listen to you when you tried again. Now it's far easier to reengage, to take the chance. You're not penalized for the loss or for being too young. That changes the whole risk-reward scenario."

A cofounder and former master franchisee of Jiffy Lube International Inc. (one of his units held the record for most oil changes in a day: 1,649), Spinelli cashed out some years back. Eager to share the life that made him so successful, he became a college professor. In his role as director of the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship, at Babson College, in Wellesley, Mass., Spinelli has spearheaded the creation of a revolutionary curriculum for a select group of second-year graduate students taking their M.B.A.'s in entrepreneurship. The new program completely replaces standard class work for the group and practically guarantees that before graduation, all in it (some individually, some in teams) will launch a new business.

"We pride ourselves on delivering education that is relevant and changes with the market, and the whole business model for start-ups has changed with the Internet," says Kate O'Halloran, associate director of the Blank Center and the person most responsible for ensuring that Spinelli's ambitious brainchild remains grounded in reality. "Granted, this program never would have gained legitimacy two or three years ago, but now it reflects the market and the way the world has changed."

What Spinelli has done, in partnership with several other professors at Babson, including the aforementioned Jeffry Timmons, is to develop an entirely new program called the Entrepreneurship Intensity Track (EIT), designed to provide a year of specialized study to those students with the highest potential to start a viable business. Babson spent the past year (and close to $1 million) developing the EIT, but it's still a "beta test right now," as O'Halloran says -- an important one.

One reason for the high cost is that the EIT will also serve as a pilot program for Babson's future use of long-distance-learning technology. The EIT was designed with minimal formal classroom sessions. Students will work together in teams on their own schedules much of the time, and Spinelli intends to incorporate a distance-learning component, including online content and Web-based simulations. "It will help us make better use of the Babson brain trust and provide more collisions with reality for these 21 students," O'Halloran adds. Compared with traditional programs, "this is a half-baked, barely ready-to-go program that Steve and I have a lot of passion for and conviction about."

What she means is that even though the EIT design process has been thorough, it's still a pilot program this year and enough room has been left for winging it as it goes along. Spinelli intends to fine-tune the curriculum further depending on what happens in this first year. "Even on the intensity track, there will be different paces for different students," says Spinelli. "I mean, even before the formal course work started, one had angel investors ready."

There are other graduate schools attempting new programs -- Fordham University in New York City, to name one, recently announced a new class in which students work directly with CEOs of dot-com start-ups -- but Babson has the most experience. It became one of the first to offer entrepreneurship M.B.A.'s in 1967. In 1993, Babson famously remade its entire academic structure, building the first curriculum organized according to the growth stages of a business. The EIT began this past summer, with all the students interning in early-stage start-ups all over the map.

"It was real work, not bad," says student Kirt Poss, 30, of his internship at Boston Scientific Corp., a medical-devices developer. The beauty is, that's the field he intends to enter with his own start-up, which he has already named VisEn Medical. "I have a line on a new imaging technology, which I found when I started my career at a research lab in a Boston hospital. I kept in touch with the head of the lab and talked to him about starting a company around his technology, and now we're putting together a company."

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