Innovative curriculum
The growing body of research is gradually demystifying the process of entrepreneurship, and reinforcing CIE with intellectual rigor. But so much of the center’s mission is geared toward teaching students from Foster and around the UW how to launch new ventures. And here’s where theory meets reality—in popular courses such as John Castle’s Creating a
Company, Emer Dooley’s Entrepreneurial Decision Making and Shah’s Innovation Strategy. Lance Young’s Entrepreneurial Finance has become nothing short of a phenomenon, where rich content hits the road. It has to be. His students are members of Venture Capital Investment Competition teams, MBAs interning at VC firms, doctoral students commercializing their inventions, a crab boat captain looking to expand, a 21 year old trying to do Hulu in Japan. “Many of them need to know this right now,” Young says. “They’re absolutely riveted.” He gives them reason. He works the classroom like a hyper-animated talk show host, engaging, challenging every last student. And hour by hour, he translates the principles of finance into the ambiguous and exacting reality of venture funding. And his students undergo a transformation. “In the beginning they don’t know how contracts work and they feel like entrepreneurs are getting badly ripped off by these guys,” Young says. “It takes some time to understand that, in new venture financing, it’s all about aligning incentives. By the end of the course they rise to the level of understanding why the form of these contracts and investments follows their function. “You can’t see that in a basic finance class. But here we leave the vacuum of theory, loosen up some of our more restrictive assumptions. That’s the value of these kinds of practical entrepreneurship classes. We present the frameworks so students can take them out into the world and understand how things really work—see the forest for the trees.”
The catalyst With its handful of entrepreneurs-in-residence and 20-35 interns per quarter, the New Venture Group in the UW Center for Commercialization (UWC4C) is where ideas are made strong enough to weather the treacherous journey into the world of start-ups or sent back to the drawing board. In many cases, the New Venture Group is the first place a new technology meets a Foster MBA or where a founding team with an MBA student already onboard meets an experienced entrepreneur who knows the ropes and has the connections to attract money and generate buzz. “When we identify a promising technology,” says Jim Roberts, business development officer in the New Venture Group, “we bring in the entrepreneur-in-residence and the students to help find out what the marketing opportunities are and what some of the applications might be for the new technology.” And, those students almost always have some connection
16 fo s t e r BUSINESS
Foster Evening MBA graduate Daniel Rossi, right, and UW mechanical engineering PhD candidate Dustin Miller are the co-founders of Nanocel.
© iStockphoto.com/SKrow, GeoffreyHolman, geopaul, hidesy
“The personal traits literature has not given us a lot of insight into who or what is an entrepreneur,” adds Suresh Kotha, CIE’s research director and the Douglas E. Olesen/Battelle Excellence Chair in Entrepreneurship. “Now people are looking beyond the entrepreneur at the environment and opportunity as well.” In his own prolific scholarship, Kotha has studied innovation, corporate investment in new ventures, and the role of entrepreneurial passion versus preparedness in convincing investors. He facilitates a strong cohort of entrepreneurship researchers at the Foster School—among them Shah, Warren Boeker, Kevin Steensma, Xiao-Ping Chen—as well as a thriving doctoral program in technology entrepreneurship. But one of his most visible contributions is in founding and co-directing the West Coast Research Symposium on Technology Entrepreneurship. This annual symposium, a partnership of the Kauffman Foundation and entrepreneurship centers at the UW, Stanford, Oregon, USC, and UC Irvine, connects young scholars with established researchers, and develops doctoral students doing work in entrepreneurship—contributing to a vanguard of innovative thinkers.