October 2009 Archives

I just returned from attending the annual Global Consortium for Entrepreneurship Centers conference, hosted this year by Rice University in Houston.

GCEC was founded in 1996 (as NCEC at the time) to provide a coordinated way for participating members to communicate on the issues and challenges confronting university-based entrepreneurship centers.  GCEC now has over 200 university members -- including the top universities in the United States and around the world.  Conference attendance was close to 400 and attendees were able to select from 42 different sessions on an amazingly diverse and interesting set of topics. 

Every time I attend and participate, I am inspired by the popularity and demand for entrepreneurship education at universities everywhere and by the creativity and breadth of what is happening at other schools.  On the other hand, I'm always jolted by the feeling that we've only scratched the surface in our own program and that it's time to get back to the work of delivering on our mission.

Keynote speakers included Dr. Ed Roberts, Founder/Chair, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; Catherine Rohr, Founder, Prison Entrepreneur Program (everyone was emotionally affected by her talk); and Dr. Jack Gill, Founder, Vanguard Ventures.  Perhaps the runaway favorite, however, was Michael Holthouse, formerly the founder of Paranet, Inc., who spoke about his new passion as Founder of Lemonade Day. 

Take a look at these websites:
http://houston.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2006/09/11/story5.html
http://www.lemonadeday.org/public/pag219.aspx

I have a new appreciation for the curbside lemonade stand as a wonderful platform for entrepreneurship education for children (the investor pitch item in the checklist is particularly informative!).  Having begun a few years ago as a program for at-risk kids, with (only!) a couple of thousand lemonade stands in Houston opening on the same day.........the program has grown to over 27,000 lemonade stands nationwide.  Lemonade Day opens up a whole new world to young, at-risk kids, who have never imagined the enabling power of entrepreneurship and possibilities for self-directed opportunities.  

I co-presented with Connie Bourassa-Shaw, Director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, at the University of Washington-Seattle's Michael G. Foster Business School at a session entitled University Programs Making an Impact: Environmental Innovation/Clean Tech Entrepreneurship.

Other selected sessions of interest included: Alliances and Partnerships Across Institutions, Incubators & Collaborative Environments, Social Entrepreneurship, Life Science Entrepreneurship, Graduate Masters Programs in Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization, Going Global, and one of the most provocative - What Will Entrepreneurship Programs Look Like in 2019?

Consistent themes included student demand for entrepreneurship education, the desire from the corporate world for more entrepreneurial and interdisciplinary skills among graduates, and the requests on campuses from other departments/schools to bring entrepreneurship education into their programs.

In other words - evidence shows that demand is high from several directions, while entrepreneurship centers are seen as enabling go-to organizations. Meanwhile, we commiserated together on how difficult it is to create and support interdisciplinary and collaborative missions.  A value of the conference was associating with like-minded colleagues facing similar challenges.

The shared vision of leaders in entrepreneurship education recognizes the simple fact that large companies don't innovate. For years, large companies have seen declines in their employment.  Large companies that are unable to change and redefine themselves fail. Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial leaders have driven economic development and job creation in the U.S. for years.  

Additionally, the U.S. has maintained its leadership in the world through innovation and entrepreneurship.  We accept risk and tolerate failure to a degree that is rare in many developed countries.  What's changing dramatically on a global scale is that countries like China, India, Brazil and many others share our same characteristics of risk tolerance.  Their arrival as major economic forces in the world economy has transformed the competitive landscape.  It is critical that we do everything we can to foster entrepreneurship education.  To fail on this front is to impair the future prospects of today's youth.

Graduate Entrepreneurs Association (GEA) - Annual Fall Retreat

I thought I'd take a break from a series of things that I've written about -- the myths and realities of entrepreneurship and education -- to report on another fantastic event, our annual GEA Retreat, which I attended last Friday.  The purpose of this annual fall event is to welcome new MBA students to the program and to our business community; to give them a taste of the entrepreneurial Kool-Aid that defines Boulder.

This event, organized by the GEA, and sponsored by the Deming Center, has been a tradition for several years.  This year it was held at Chautauqua.  In most past years it has been held at a venue far up in the mountains - great introduction to Colorado for our out-of-state and international students - but logistically challenging.

 (The distance and high altitude nature of past locations also contributed to it being called a "retreat"- despite my constant observation that to use the words "retreat" and "entrepreneurship" in the same sentence is an oxymoron.) 

We had close to 100 attendees this year - mostly 1st year MBA students, a number of 2nd year MBA students, as a number of faculty members, and about 20 participating speakers and panelists as well. Click here to see the list:
GEA Retreat 2009 - Speaker List.pdf

Special thanks to the participants who served on panels entitled "Young Entrepreneurs," "Finance," and "Awesome Entrepreneurs."  (I thought they were all awesome.)  Great stories, lots of lessons learned, and truly inspiring.  I walked away with several new insights and several more stories for the telling.

But no take-away was more compelling, once again, then the willingness of Boulder's entrepreneurs to give their time to provide help and perspective for our students that are interested in taking advantage. Tim Falls noted well the unique openness and approachability of the Boulder entrepreneurial community.

Thanks to Tim and to Jay Wilson who organized this year's event and to all of the panelists and participants who made it such a successful day.
 

Ashoka

As enjoyable as the GEA Retreat proved to be,  I was sorry to miss another milestone event on campus.

The University of Colorado (CU) has been named a "Changemaker Campus" by Ashoka, the largest association of leading social entrepreneurs in the world. The partnership brings together students, faculty, and staff from across campus to transform the university into a hub for social change.

The Initiative kicked off with a weekend retreat, featuring visits by Lynn Price, Ashoka Fellow and Founder, Camp to Belong,  Chris Pelley and the Ashoka U team. Thanks to Lennon Flowers and Erin Krampetz for organizing the three-day event.

Stay tuned - more to come on the topic of social entrepreneurship.
 

We are asked this question often. We respond with a pretty robust list of the things that we do. But I can't simply answer that question without addressing two more: 1) Why are these things important? and 2) How do we measure success?

What Deming does:

You can read our 2014 Vision Statement and learn more about the nature and details of our programs on our  Web site. The Deming Center exists to support the mission of the Leeds School of Business and to promote entrepreneurship broadly across the CU-Boulder campus. Our first priority is to provide students with entrepreneurship skills - to prepare them for entrepreneurial careers in start-up companies, emerging growth and rapidly changing businesses, corporate entrepreneurship and even social entrepreneurship. Our larger goal is to build access and integration between our University's research and teaching capabilities, our entrepreneurial-minded students, and our larger business community.

We approach our role by considering three critically important constituencies:

• Faculty and Ph.D. candidates. We support faculty and Ph.D. candidates by helping them make contacts in the business community to facilitate their research and stimulate their classrooms. We also sponsor informal events and invite faculty members to present research and business plans to members of our Business Board and other entrepreneurial business leaders.
• Students. We support students by complementing their classroom education with access to valuable experiential opportunities. We tap into our vast Deming Network to open doors for students through projects, internships, mentorships, and many other opportunities.
• Leaders of the Boulder/Denver Business community. We work to create value for our business community by facilitating their access to our students and to the resources of the university. We also create networking opportunities for business leaders to meet others both within and outside of their particular business sectors.

As for student-focused activities, we support business plan competitions at the graduate and undergraduate levels, including the annual Venture Capital Investment Competition, for which we host an annual regional competition and sponsor a team of Leeds MBA students. We sponsor student entrepreneurship organizations such as the Graduate Entrepreneurs Association (GEA) and the undergraduate Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization (CEO). From time to time, I'll highlight some of these events as they are held, and talk about the student stories behind them.

This Friday, we'll be hosting our annual GEA Retreat. This event introduces our incoming MBA students to many members of the Boulder entrepreneurial community, and our business leaders to them, through a full day of presentations and panel discussions. Needless to say, there will be a healthy dose of socializing and networking as well. For several years, the GEA Retreat has been an inspiring demonstration of the entrepreneurial spirit of Boulder and the willingness of our local business community to engage with and support our students. (I can't help but observe that I still have a problem with the use of the words "entrepreneur" and "retreat" in the same sentence! But the name has stuck and the event is always a great success.)

In future blogs, I will discuss the importance of what we do and how we measure success.I ask for your thoughts and reactions.

What we're building - and the success that we achieve - affects many constituencies: students/future alums; faculty; and the community in which we operate. At the heart of our thriving entrepreneurial community is a leading research and teaching university. We build success through effective two-way access. We consider it our responsibility to build that access, based upon your input and feedback.

During one of my first entrepreneurial experiences - as part of the management team of an early stage software company - a group of us was sitting around late one night at the end of a challenging day.  One of the guys observed that everyone in the room had left a much larger company to join our relatively small one for similar reasons - to escape the policy and procedures, the layers of management, and with a personal desire to have a bigger, direct impact on a business. And yet we had just spent the better part of a couple of days attempting to draw from those prior experiences in order to implement many of those same processes into our new business!  We all realized that it had become necessary to bring some order to what had become a pretty chaotic situation. 

I frequently encounter misperceptions, or myths as I call them, about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial environments.  Among them that entrepreneurship is narrowly defined, that it's about only small companies, and that in education it is somehow a lesser business skill than the traditional disciplines of business - finance, accounting, management and strategy.  I call one of these myths the "Big Bang Theory" - that it's all about finding the big idea and that the idea alone will create the success.   That oversimplified perspective ignores the hard work and tenacity that are required for entrepreneurial success.   I've also experienced a corollary to that view during a discussion with a Leeds MBA student.  The student expressed his amazement at the creative entrepreneurial energy that he'd observed since joining our program at the Leeds Business School.  But he was about to disqualify himself from pursuing an entrepreneurial career because he felt that he lacked "the big idea."   These misperceptions can cast a negative view on the perceived value of an entrepreneurship education and how a curriculum that emphasizes entrepreneurship can have broadly applied value.

I recently had a conversation with a group of Leeds MBA students about these topics - about the fundamental importance, value and applicability of entrepreneurial skills.  The process of building an entrepreneurial company --startup or emerging growth-- requires the application of all business skills in what I would describe as the most difficult management environment - one that is undercapitalized, rapidly changing, unpredictable and often seemingly chaotic.  To succeed in such environments, entrepreneurial businesses must have the best talent - the best financial skills, the best marketing skills, and the best strategic selling skills.  These companies can't afford to compromise because they have so little margin of error.  The key is that the members of an entrepreneurial team not only have those specific skills but that they can apply them in such a challenging environment.

At the end of the day, entrepreneurship is still about basic business and management fundamentals - just applied in a demanding, challenging, innovative and highly rewarding environment.  That's a great combination to strive for in any business career.