Many types of startup accelerators . Clean tech, bio tech, tech, natural food.
Network effects Horizontal better than vertical integration Open sharing of information Case of silicon Valley vs Boston.
Leaders and feeders. Balance is necessary. Feeders are all external organisations – unis, investors etc.
Long term vision. Economic cycles. Optimism when things are going bad, then things pick up again, and then when they fall back down, loss of interest in entrepreneurship. Progress reversed. Silicon Valley started in the 40’s.
Universities are feeders. Very Important but not necessary. Technology transfer offices, entrepreneurship programs, students, professors, research labs. Students and profs are the vital components.
Entrepreneurship programs shouldn’t be in business schools. Business students would then wait for the busy scientists to come to them. Instead, they should go to the scientists. Entrepreneurship programs should be accessible to scientific community.
Study the Stanford Silicon Valley link.
Advantages of Unis: Open spaces, conference room, auditoriums, interested faculty and students in entrepreneurship. Cross collaborate between Law, medical, engineering, business.
Look into technology transfer office as revenue source for schools but be wary of over exploitation.
Set up blog, social media. Make noise about the community.
Non zero sum game. Give assignments to test whether members serious.
Events New tech meetup Open coffee clubs Startup weekends Office hours
Set up entrepreneurship center Allow cross collaboration Emphasis on law center as major player Allow non business students access to entrepreneurship center and certificate.
Challenges:1. Entrepreneurship engagement is not rewarded within faculty incentive structure 2. Lack of resources for entrepreneurial programs 3. Cross campus collaboration not in DNA of a university
Challenge 1: Entrepreneurial engagement is not rewarded within the faculty incentive structure. Scholarship and basic research are the university’s coins of the realm. Commercialization and entrepreneurship are, at best, viewed as a nice version of faculty service. At worst, junior pretenure faculty commits career suicide by getting too involved in these “distractions.” The solution is to not try to slay the largest dragon.
True believers around entrepreneurship in a university float a vision that startups will count toward faculty tenure, and a high percentage of professors will become entrepreneurs. In almost all cases, this is false and results in a quixotic quest to start with the hardest problems on a campus. Instead, the true believers should pursue winnable opportunities unlikely to encounter institutional resistance.
For example, my passion over the past five years involves what amounts to a startup within CU Boulder, known as the Silicon Flatirons Center’s Entrepreneurial Initiative. Universities are great, natural conveners with often excellent and sometimes underutilized facilities. Leveraging this, we launched a series of public events that connect and celebrate the startup community, with the ambition to connect the CU campus and the software/telecom/geek portions of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
In the past year, we helped provide 48 public-facing startup events with over 6,500 attendees. We created a nerve center of startup activity on campus that did not require approvals or funding from central campus, the CU Regents, or other administrative bodies. It just required a few committed individuals within the university to move it forward.
Challenge 2: We don’t have the resources to do X. Resource challenges typically take the form of shortages in the number of professors to teach classes, money to fund initiatives, and facilities to house programs. This is especially true today, given dismal and declining public support for American research universities. The solution is to co-opt your community’s resources. The best course I’ve been associated with is Venture Capital, a class that I co-teach with Jason Mendelson from Foundry Group. Similar patterns of community involvement, such as hosting the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup, reinforce our roles as conveners in the community.
In a similar vein, CU’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic helps form and launch 20 startups a year, which is made possible by a network of 15 volunteer attorneys who work closely with law students to supervise the clinic’s work. The town-gown combination of full-time professor and expert practitioner, which is powerful and underutilized within academia, enables a university’s entrepreneurship efforts to take flight without having to be entirely self-funded and self-sufficient.
Challenge 3: Cross-campus collaboration is not in the DNA of the university. Entrepreneurship is a cross-functional activity and cuts across many departments in a university. Often each department that gets involved in entrepreneurship wants direct and immediate benefits from its efforts. Departments and centers each chase the same donors, are architected as individual silos, and lack a tradition of rewarding interdisciplinary work. Finally, members of different department efforts are regularly compared in a winner-take-all fashion.
The solution is to pick your rival intelligently. Focus the campus and supporters on the real competition, which is a competing university, not the department across the street. At CU Boulder, I highlight that the real competition is the University of Texas (and Austin), the University of Washington (and Seattle), Duke and the University of North Carolina (and Research Triangle Park), and leading universities in startup communities in India, China, Brazil, and elsewhere.
Furthermore, leaders on campus should identify common projects to work on that span the campus. This nurtures trust, opens lines of communication, and sends an important signal of collaboration to the community. For example, half a dozen organizations at CU Boulder jointly built and run a cross-campus entrepreneurship championship series, titled the CU New Venture Challenge. One of our objectives is to collapse the campus and assemble wide numbers of individuals that rarely connect in other contexts. Campus efforts to catalyze entrepreneurship, like the startups they seek to promote, involve significant risk of failure.
When they fail, this should be accepted and not punished. When they succeed, although there is rarely the equity upside for the campus participants that accompany startup success, the experience built in the context of the university is powerful. Connecting a university to a startup community prepares students to perform valuable roles in growing industries and, in turn, the community benefits from a university that provides talent, opens its doors, and fosters an environment that celebrates the startup.