The University of Rochester received a grant to infuse entrepreneurial education into six campus schools — including music, nursing, and education.

Building a Better Entrepreneurial Education

The word entrepreneurship often is associated with business terms like sweat equity, startup costs, and the liberating phrase, “Be your own boss.”  Revenue, ROI, and profit are typical measures of entrepreneurial success, at least for the typical entrepreneur.  And becoming an entrepreneur is gaining popularity with students: a May 19, 2008, article in the Wall Street Journal reports that “Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job…80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship…[and] tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds.” 

But these students—and their schools—no longer think about entrepreneurship in typical ways. The twenty-first century has already been marked by rapid change. Our economy is becoming increasingly knowledge based. Therefore, the innovation and adaptability traditionally associated with entrepreneurship are also becoming more prized as outcomes of college.

Entrepreneurship at Rochester

Responding to these trends, the University of Rochester is fostering entrepreneurial skills in unexpected fields like education, engineering, nursing, and music—and in the business department, too.  A 2003 grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation funded the university’s Center for Entrepreneurship, an entity that collaborates with multiple departments to introduce entrepreneurship to students, regardless of their majors.  Rochester is not the only school investing in the idea: the Kauffman Foundation has awarded grants to eighteen other universities for similar programs.

At Rochester, entrepreneurship is the “transformation of an idea into an enterprise that creates value—economic, social, cultural, or intellectual.”  Indeed, Rochester’s brand of entrepreneurship focuses very little on the profit portion of the field.  Courses in the entrepreneurial spirit are found in six schools on campus (engineering, business, education, nursing, music and arts and sciences), and Rochester is the only Kauffman school that has a relationship with its nursing school, Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship Duncan Moore proudly points out.  “Most of the projects being proposed by the students are not around business entrepreneurship, but social entrepreneurship,” he says. “Students are much more interested in social good than they were ten years ago.” 

Social and cultural entrepreneurship, though, are nothing new.  In its proposal to the Kauffman Foundation, the university used the examples of Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, and George Eastman—three historic Rochester figures representing three different types of entrepreneurship.  Scott Sweeney, a graduate student and head of the Simon Entrepreneurs Club at Rochester, writes in an e-mail that “social entrepreneurship measures success in terms of the impact the business has on society in the form of a social change, rather than in profits or monetary return.  This is where entrepreneurship stands to make a difference.”  Entrepreneurship not only creates value, but generates change as well. 

So, if entrepreneurship can be defined as the creation of value, the professors are left with their own entrepreneurial problem: how to create a valuable class?

Students from the center’s Kauffman Entrepreneurial Year (KEY) Program organized a two-day symposium on sustainable energy. The KEY Program offers selected students a fifth, tuition-free, year of college to encourage students to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors.

Unleashing the Inner Entrepreneur

“If we want to be sure our students will have a long career…they should have either international or entrepreneurial experiences," Moore says. “That’s not going to get outsourced.”  Such experience, while intangible, is taught by focusing on skills and outcomes.  Ray Ricker, director of the Institute for Music Leadership and professor for several entrepreneurship courses, believes that all students, regardless of major, should be able to envision the future and think across disciplines.  And, in many ways, teaching entrepreneurship is similar to teaching music—notes, scales, and even music appreciation can all be taught, but you can’t teach an individual to be a musician. 

Ricker makes the distinction between teaching entrepreneurial skills and, in his case, music: he isn’t trying to create entrepreneurs, but he is teaching skilled musicians entrepreneurial skills to better compete in their field.  An example would be his “Entrepreneurship in Music” course: topics range from how to obtain grants to how to distribute and market your music independently to how to do your taxes (note: musicians can deduct a lot).  Royalties, residuals, and creative property make the course sound, well, like a business class, but being able to adapt and succeed in other arenas is as important as musical ability for Ricker’s students.  “It takes more than being a good player to be successful in music,” he says. “You need to have other skills as well.”    

Sweeney acknowledges that “entrepreneurship is innate to some degree.  However…learning about entrepreneurship, writing a business plan, and these types of things have the potential to ‘unleash’ one’s inner entrepreneur.”  And tapping that inner entrepreneur benefits not just the entrepreneur, but those working with him or her as well.  For example, one person working alone cannot know all the relevant and needed information in a complex situation.  As a result, the ability to work well within a team, communicate effectively, and analyze different perspectives is important in order to mitigate the risk of the unknown.  While knowledge within a specific field is valuable, knowing when it’s not enough is also important.

Innovation across Disciplines

Students aren’t the only ones practicing for the unknown at the Center for Entrepreneurship.  The five-year grant from the Kauffman Foundation is nearly finished, and Moore and his colleagues are thinking about the center’s next steps (and, like good entrepreneurs, how to make it better).

The field of entrepreneurship is also undefined.  Although centers like the one at Rochester often are located within the business school or department, Rochester’s center has no single home on campus.  In many ways, such independence is fitting for a center that integrates multiple departments and teaches broad-based skills.  And the advantages of an entrepreneurial mindset only increase as the economy changes and the world flattens. “Entrepreneurship is what computer science was in the 1970s—no one knows what’s next,” Moore says.

This feature article was guest-written by AAC&U marketing and public relations associate Ursula Gross.

For more information on entrepreneurship education at the University of Rochester, visit the Web pages for the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Institute for Music Leadership. See also the Peer Review issue dedicated to entrepreneurship and its role in liberal education. Watch the publications page for AAC&U's forthcoming publication, Creating the Entrepreneurial University to Support Liberal Education, due out in late summer 2008.