Educating the Entrepreneur

Three clean-cut business majors step up to the podium in a large seminar room in McConnell Hall, armed with bottled water and a laptop computer. In the last days of their Strategic Management course, the students launch into a Power Point presentation of their SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of Enron, a ravenous leviathan of a corporation. Already one of the world's largest gas and electricity suppliers, Texas-based Enron has announced its intention to become a dominant e-commerce business as well. The students dissect the company's sprawling business plan, closing with savvy suggestions for its future, such as forming alliances with digital technology cartels and moving into fiber optic technology markets.

Welcome to the new wave in business education. Students learn to think on their feet, relying more on up-to-the-minute Internet information than on textbooks. In the past, business students studied management roles and corporate structure and capabilities. But quantum leaps in information technologies and the rise of venture capital networks have democratized business and industry, spawning a mobile generation of entrepreneurs and "knowledge workers" whose intellectual capital drives today's businesses. These students will soon enter fast-paced work environments in which they'll be expected to make strategic decisions and change roles almost as often as they change socks.

In response, the Whittemore School of Business and Economics and some 400 other schools across the country are creating new kinds of business curricula, stressing continuous learning and rapid integration of new technology. This fall, the Whittemore School will offer a new option for business administration majors: entrepreneurial venture creation (EVC). The cross-disciplinary concentration draws from the school's management, decision sciences, finance and accounting, and marketing departments to give emerging entrepreneurs the critical-thinking skills and knowledge base they'll need to compete in the new economy.

In addition to their basic business courses, EVC students will take courses in new-product development, new-venture financing and entrepreneurial leadership. Business leaders will come to class often to allow students to critique their businesses' concepts, while angel investors and venture capitalists will share their techniques for evaluating markets and individual entrepreneurs, regaling students with true tales from their world of high-risk adventures.

The capstone course for the EVC option is "Managing the Entrepreneurial Venture," in which students research and write a business plan for a potential new venture. The plan can then be entered into competition for the annual Paul J. Holloway Jr. Prize, awarded to students who create the best plan for starting, acquiring or expanding an entrepreneurial venture. The competition has already spawned dozens of alumni businesses.

Professors are as excited about the changing curriculum as the students are, according to Jeff Sohl, professor of decision sciences, who worked with seven Whittemore School colleagues to develop the new EVC option. "Anyone who teaches in this arena has to be entrepreneurial themselves. To stay current in this field, we have to be way ahead of the textbooks and draw on the fly from real case studies," explains Sohl. "What we do is bring academic rigor to applied problems--problems that we can actually see, feel and touch. And we not only think about today's issues but try to identify tomorrow's. I can't imagine a more exciting place to be."

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