September 2005

The Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

Continued from page 3

By Katharine Dunn

Students as Entrepreneurs
While the Deshpande Center supports the creators of technology, the Entrepreneurship Center at Sloan nurtures the businesspeople involved with invention. The E-Center's chief purpose is education. Since 1996 it has housed the two dozen entrepreneurship-related courses offered by Sloan, including the I-Teams course. All of the courses are open to students campuswide. "We make an effort to market courses around campus," says former E-Center program manager Bob Ayan, MBA '02, who was known to hand out business cards at places like science and engineering business club meetings.

Still, about 75 percent of the courses' enrollment comes from Sloan. Two of the E-Center's most popular courses, the Entrepreneurship Lab and the Global Entrepreneurship Lab, place students with real-world companies, where they work for course credit in teams to solve problems "that keep the CEO awake at night," says Ayan. Those problems have included devising a marketing plan for a pre-IPO company and coming up with ways a company could expand. The center also supports several student entrepreneurship groups--including the Venture Capital and Private Equity Club, the BioPharma Business Club, and the $50K--giving office space to some and advice to others.

It is only recently that entrepreneurship groups at Sloan and those from the rest of MIT have interacted with each other in an official way. For example, this year the $50K will be co-led by a Sloan student and an engineering student for the first time in its 16-year history. The student leaders hope to improve the competition by supplementing the formal 200-person events it has hosted in the past with small networking dinners where scientists and business students will feel more comfortable interacting.

A Model for Others
For decades, outside organizations have looked to MIT for inspiration and support in their own pursuit of innovation and entrepreneurship. When Winston Churchill visited MIT in 1949, he spoke of how American technological innovations such as radar--developed at MIT--had helped the Allies win World War II. Britain, he said, had suffered from a paucity of colleges that made engineering and other practical disciplines a priority. A decade later, the University of Cambridge founded Churchill College, which focused on science and technology. In 2000, Cambridge forged a stronger link with MIT when the two schools teamed to create the Cambridge-MIT Institute, a $100 million partnership to encourage entrepreneurship in the U.K.

Today there are many international entrepreneurship activities at MIT. The E-Center runs the $50K Global Startup Workshop, which trains people from universities in other countries, such as Italy, the U.K., and China, to run their own business plan competitions. The Enterprise Forum has two dozen chapters around the world that provide business education and advice to members. Over the last year, Joe Hadzima '73, chair of the forum, has spoken to groups in Norway, Finland, Sweden, the U.K., Spain, and the Philippines about ways to adapt some of MIT's ideas for their countries.

"Switzerland has world-class science but not a lot of entrepreneurial activity. And we can't just take this system and put it over there," says Hadzima, who also teaches in the E-Center. Nevertheless, he says, "there is no reason the ecosystem concept can't be spread. We supply the water and food, and [they] provide life in a local environment." Hadzima's goal is to better connect the chapters of the forum, so they can make use of each other's resources. So, for example, the Detroit chapter could help members in other states get in touch with people in the auto industry.

MIT's entrepreneurial ecosystem isn't perfect. Hadzima says that things can get "messy" when, for example, groups fail to communicate with each other and schedule activities for the same night. The $50K organizers are concerned that many engineering and science students continue to see the competition as a Sloan event, not one open to them. And it's yet to be determined what roles student-researchers can assume in the Institute spin-off companies they help form. But entrepreneurship, by its nature, is about taking risks. So it's no surprise that MIT is coming up with new ways--including some that may not always work--to support and nurture its future entrepreneurs.