More schools teaching entrepreneurship

Research-Technology Management, March-April, 2008 by Peter Gwynne

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A series of new pro grams in business schools and undergraduate colleges illustrates a growing trend in college-level education: teaching and encouraging entrepreneurship. Increasing numbers of private and public universities and hospitals offer formal programs that train students to spot spin-off opportunities of the type that led to the famous Route 128 in Massachusetts and Silicon Valley in California---or to develop disruptive advances in traditional corporations.

The trend has clear implications for large technology-based corporations in general and their research managers in particular. "Recruiting people with an entrepreneurial mindset is an almost necessary condition in a turbulent age," says Graham Mitchell, director of Lehigh University's Program in Entrepreneurship. But corporations that aim to recruit the brightest graduates with that mindset will find themselves in tough competition with start-up firms and other small companies that offer the graduates the opportunity to put their learning into practice immediately, without having to overcome the corporate red tape that often slows the application of new ideas and modes of thinking.

Entrepreneurship education is hardly a 21st century phenomenon. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hotbed of spin-offs that created the Route 128 phenomenon in the 1960s, started up its Entrepreneurship Center 16 years ago. Other research universities introduced their own courses in entrepreneurship during the 1990s. Even Harvard Business School, the epitome of education for future leaders of traditional corporations, has a mandatory course on entrepreneurship.

In the past two years, however, the pace has quickened significantly. According to the National Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, about 160 academic centers now teach the subject. "I'd describe the situation more as a new phase in entrepreneurship education than a new awareness," says Jonathan Rosen, executive director of Boston University's Institute of Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (ITEC).

ITEC, created with the goal of "educating, training, mentoring, and providing networking programs and opportunities that support the new entrepreneur," illustrates the growing interest in providing students with an entrepreneurial mindset. So does Boston University's Entrepreneurial Research Lab. Run jointly by ITEC and the university's Office of Technology Development, it has just taken in the first participants in a program intended to stimulate creation of companies and to commercialize technology developed by university researchers.

Across the river in Cambridge, meanwhile, MIT has greatly expanded its offerings in entrepreneurship and education. In September 2006, its Sloan School of Management started a new program that adds a Certificate in Entrepreneurship & Innovation to the conventional M.B.A. degree. "We expected it to be a pilot test with 10 to 15 students," says Edward B. Roberts, the founder and chair of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center who heads the new program. "We had 130 out of about 300 students in the M.B.A. class apply for it." Roberts and his colleagues selected 50 students, half of whom had already been entrepreneurs, who will receive their certificates in May 2008.

Global Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship education is also going global. MIT has just received a gift of $50 million from the Dubai-based investment firm Legatum to create a Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. The center has the goal of supporting aspiring entrepreneurs from the developing world.

What has stimulated the growing interest in entrepreneurship courses? Lehigh's Mitchell sees it as a natural outcome of recent years' turbulence that has changed the face of traditional employment. Today's college students, he says, "grew up seeing their parents losing what they had hoped would be long-lasting jobs and employment security, and so are more attuned to the increasingly rapid pace of changing market needs." Beyond that, he adds, "we're seeing something of an educational paradigm shift. Rather than sitting down for lectures in traditional topics, students are gravitating to learning experiences where they participate in teams and are motivated by solving novel problems."

ITEC's Rosen sees another characteristic in students who sign up for Boston University's courses in entrepreneurship. "Almost universally, they want to make a contribution--to take responsibility and learn how to analyze risk," he says. "Regardless of whether they're going into private practice as a dentist, setting up a clinic in Zimbabwe, or going to work for Johnson & Johnson, all of them want to contribute. That requires management skills that are teachable."

What They Teach

What skills do entrepreneurship courses instill in their students? Each institution puts its own patina on its offerings. MIT's Sloan School, for example, offers about 35 courses in entrepreneurship. Three of those illustrate the breadth of teaching. "Global Entrepreneurship," Roberts says, "puts people into activities related to overseas." The most popular Sloan School course, it requires teams of five students to work in a foreign country for three weeks. The Social Entrepreneurship course, by contrast, "is very domestically oriented, telling students how to start up companies with a social focus," Roberts continues.