Universities: Your New Best Friend

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If you're looking for academic resources, what should your first step be? A good first contact is an entrepreneurship professor at the nearest business school. If the school has its own entrepreneurship center, even better, since it will likely have a community focus. For links to 60 centers around the country, visit the Web site for the National Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (www.nationalconsortium.org).

Some programs described in this article -- such as the Wolverine Venture Fund and the Kentucky Research and Development Voucher Fund -- will require you to fill out an application. Others, such as Utek Corp. (www.utekcorp.com) and TechKnowledge Point (www.techknowledgepoint.com), are intended to be portals into academia's rich but often hard-to-find resources.

At schools where the kind of help available to growth companies is very traditional -- along the lines of student consulting projects or internships -- networking is the key. You can often mingle with the entrepreneurship faculty by attending business-school events that are open to the public. With just a hint of self-interest, Donald F. Kuratko, executive director of Ball State University's entrepreneurship program, recommends taking someone in his position to lunch. Not only do you get the director's undivided attention, but you also avoid the nightmare of trying to find on-campus parking.

Once you meet, it's important to take the right approach. "If you call a college and say, 'What do you have to offer?' you won't get much," warns Babson College's Stephen Spinelli. Agrees Robert Sullivan, dean of the University of North Carolina's business school, "If there's an entrepreneur with a company and they're simply looking for a handout, generally we don't encourage them." Universities have limited resources just like everyone else these days, and their number one concern remains their students. So they want to know what you as a business owner can do for them.

Mostly, that means providing students with interesting learning experiences. "If entrepreneurs just want someone to go out and do a project for them, we're not as interested, as opposed to the entrepreneur that will allow our students to sit in on key meetings and really get a feel for what is going on in the business," says San Diego State University's Alex DeNoble. "If they're looking for cheap labor and they're not looking to give something back in return, to me it doesn't work." Some schools devise mechanisms for ensuring student satisfaction. In Pennsylvania State University's Learning Factory program, for example, companies submit engineering problems for seniors to solve, but students themselves bid for the projects that they want to work on.

You further enhance your chances of getting help by self-selecting. The owner of a family business is obviously better off approaching a school with a family-business program. Hinting that you might hire the students you work with is also a good tack to take. At UNC, Sullivan is looking for companies with big ambitions and good survival prospects in part because they might someday employ his students.

In short, the opportunities at universities are there. But as with any successful marriage, you'll need to commit as much as your partner.

Interdisciplinary Help

Entrepreneurs in need of business and technical help can find them both at the new Center for Commercialization of Advanced Technology at San Diego State University (http://ccatsandiego.org). SDSU's Entrepreneurial Management Center and the University of California at San Diego's School of Engineering are collaborating with the Pentagon and a defense contractor to develop technology that has defense or homeland-security purposes. Once accepted into the program, businesses are eligible to receive a range of services. Students and faculty at the business school will hone business plans, while the engineering school can help with feasibility studies and R&D support.

Beyond the B-school

A number of schools, including the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania, have started legal clinics aimed at helping small businesses. The University of Chicago Law School Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship (http://clinic.ij.org), for instance, offers help to inner-city company builders. The clinic has three full-time staff members and is formally affiliated with the university's business school. It targets low- to moderate-income entrepreneurs in the Chicago area as well as ventures that have the potential to create jobs in depressed neighborhoods.

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