Building a business: a matter of course - college entrepreneurship programs

Nation's Business, April, 1988 by Marc Leepson

When Jack Thorne started teaching entrepreneurship at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University 15 years ago, he recalls, such courses were offered at only "four or five other schools in the country."

Today, hundreds of college-level entrepreneurship courses are taught. "It's a growing field" in higher education, Thorne says, partly because individuals, foundations and businesses have been putting up the money-generally at least $1 million-to endow chairs of entrepreneurship.

Thorne, for example, holds the David T. and Lindsay J. Morgenthaler Chair of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon. David Morgenthaler is a venture capitalist. His wife, Lindsay, is a trustee of Carnegie Mellon University.

"Typically, these kinds of chairs have been funded by people who have either made money or are close to the entrepreneurial, venture-capital area because they're interested in providing an opportunity for more teaching and better funding and more credibility for research in the area," Thorne says.

"They feel that the art is teachable, and they want to expose students to the concept of starting businesses or participating with others at the high-risk end of business. I like to think of it as teaching students to find and exploit opportunities."

At the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, in Philadelphia, Ian MacMillan directs the Snider Entrepreneurial Center, named for Ed Snider, owner of the National Hockey League's Philadelphia Flyers. MacMillan's $6-million-a-year operation also receives funds from other individuals and from various federal, state and local government programs.

Fannie May, the candy company, is one of a few American businesses directly underwriting entrepreneurial programs in colleges. Jean Thorne, who heads the family-owned firm, started the Denton Thorne Chair of Entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois' Chicago campus in 1982 in memory of her late husband, the company's former chief executive officer. Since then, Fannie May has funded entrepreneurship programs at De Paul University, in Chicago; Marquette University, in Milwaukee; and Beloit College, in Beloit, Wis.

Among other businesses funding entrepreneurial chairs is Burger King Corporation, which in 1986 established the James W. McLamore Chair in American Enterprise at the School of Business Administration, University of Miami, in Florida. McLamore, the cofounder and former president and chairman of the board of Burger King, chairs Miami's Board of Trustees.

Virtually all collegiate entrepreneurship programs-whether they receive public or private funds-have programs aimed at helping the local small-business community. Some programs are highly structured; others are less formal.

While most entrepreneurship programs concentrate on helping those about to start businesses, many help those already under way. The Wharton School, for example, is one of 13 small-business-development centers in Pennsylvania working with budding entrepreneurs and with small-business owners. "We help up to 7,000 small businesses a year, ranging in assistance from a couple of hours spent explaining to somebody how to collect receivables or manage inventory better, to helping individuals with ideas develop business plans and raise the funding," MacMillan says.

At the University of Illinois at Chicago, most who take entrepreneurship courses are full-time undergraduate or graduate students. "However, it's not uncommon for people who are running businesses to take the course," says Gerald E. Hills, a professor of marketing who holds the Denton Thorne Chair of Entrepreneurship.

Sharon Burch was running her own fledgling business while she was studying for a master's degree in business administration, and she wrote a business plan as part of her course work. "I wish I'd taken the class before I started my business," says Burch, who owns DataLex, a computer-software firm. "I see a lot of things I could have done differently. But it has helped me since I've been using the business plan as a guide for my business."

Full-time students who don't run their own businesses can work directly with businesses in two different programs at Illinois' Chicago campus. In one, students must write a business plan. Hills says he hears from many people who want to start businesses, "and quite commonly I walk into class the first day and list as many as 10 potential businesses that students can work with if they so choose, rather than taking their own ideas and writing plans."

The second program is a course designed to help small businesses. "The students [in that course] spend the entire quarter, under faculty supervision, pursuing some program" with a small business, Hills says.

The students primarily help prospective entrepreneurs develop start-up plans, feasibility studies and marketing plans. "We find that [the program] almost always turns out to be an excellent learning experience for the students, and at the same time they do a lot of the groundwork and legwork and thinking that contribute to people who are starting businesses," Hills says.