Special Report October 25, 2005, 12:31PM EST

Teaching the Startup Mentality

More and more universities are realizing that the skills needed to launch a company can be useful even to students who aren't business majors

by Jeffrey Gangemi and Francesca Di Meglio

Retta Mulugetta, a senior at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has the entrepreneurial bug. During his third year of school he started a business, Ivy Tutoring, a service targeted to freshmen and sophomores who need help in math, physics, or chemistry. But Mulugetta isn't a business student. He's majoring in biological engineering and hopes his business pursuits will help him to catapult into the pharmaceutical or biotech industries.

Educators are thinking of every student -- even those pursuing a liberal arts education -- as an entrepreneur (see BW Online, 10/28/05, "The Startup Bug Strikes Earlier"). In the years since the dot-com bust, top schools may have quit giving lots of early seed money to students, says Ken Zolot, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. But they're teaching all their students to think entrepreneurially, a skill members of the next generation will need to succeed in the corporate world, even if they never expect to be their own boss.

FROM AGRICULTURE TO ART.

"Every company, large or small, needs innovation to survive today. An entrepreneur is by definition an owner and a manager," says Bob Joss, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "They bring that element of ownership and responsibility to the company, while driving innovation from within." Now students are picking up the ownership mentality through all sorts of methods -- from entrepreneurship minors for nonbusiness students to team-based action learning (see BW Online slide show, 10/28/05, "Entrepreneurs: Cream of the Young Crop").

Across the country, more young people than ever are being exposed to entrepreneurial thinking. In the early 1990s fewer than 300 colleges or universities offered courses in entrepreneurship, says Paul Magelli, director of the Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Today, about two-thirds of the 2,000 colleges or universities that offer some sort of entrepreneurship education provide relevant courses outside of their business school, in disciplines ranging from agriculture to fine arts, according to recent research by Magelli's academy in collaboration with the E. Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City group. Recently the team found that 186 four-year institutions are offering courses in entrepreneurship designed for students outside of business schools.

MORE THAN A TRADE.

Although schools are still acting as business incubators, they support fewer student-run companies than before the dot-com bust, says Zolot. These incubators are often part of a center for entrepreneurship that encourages more academic research about the topic as a way of increasing legitimacy.

Many in the academic world never thought of entrepreneurship as anything more than a trade. In addition, more tenured faculty members are turning their attention to entrepreneurship, whereas adjuncts mostly covered the subject in the past, says Murray Low, executive director of the Lang Center for Entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School in New York.

Educators are advising students to do hands-on projects while in school and spend time working for someone else in the corporate world before launching their own businesses. And this way of thinking is spreading across the campus.

ALTERNATIVE PATH.

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