William Scott Green, Ph.D.
Senior Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education, University of Miami;
Program Director, Kauffman Campuses Initiative;
Chair, Kauffman Panel on
Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education
The Kauffman Foundation is rooted in the belief that entrepreneurial activity
is an essential strength of American society. Recent scholarship has underscored
the importance of entrepreneurship as a major generator of wealth and source of
new enterprises and technological innovation. Through much study and discussion,
entrepreneurship increasingly is being seen as the bridge between theory and
practice, allowing for integration of various fields of learning. By making
entrepreneurship education available to students across all disciplines of
study, American college students will become even more aware of entrepreneurial
activity and its importance to our economy and society.
To advance this goal further, the Foundation asked a group of distinguished
academics to deliberate on the role of entrepreneurship and why this field of
study belongs in higher education. The Panel members also explored how
entrepreneurship fits in college learning, recognizing that an entrepreneurship
curriculum often is best positioned through general education, in the various
disciplines, and as co-curricular experiences for students to actively learn
about the entrepreneurial process. Finally, the Panel considered how
entrepreneurship can influence the management of universities by infusing a more
innovative and entrepreneurial culture on the campuses.
The recommendations in the full Panel report, Entrepreneurship in
American Higher Education, are the culmination of two years of research
and study by some of the nation's most experienced and respected scholars in
economics, engineering, and the sciences. The topics discussed in this report
are a starting point for further discussion, not a fixed blueprint for every
campus. We recognize that entrepreneurial education at its best will be
responsive to needs in the local communities universities serve.
Why Entrepreneurship Matters
The values and practices of pure research—discovery, originality,
innovation—are the highest expression of American university learning.
Entrepreneurship implements innovation. It is the process that transforms
discovery and innovation into enterprises that generate value. In so doing,
entrepreneurship yields improvement of our goods, services, and institutions
that affects large numbers of people. Entrepreneurship's defining trait is the
creation of a novel enterprise that the market is willing to adopt.
Their common interest in creativity and originality binds entrepreneurship
and higher education to one another. Therefore, entrepreneurship should be both
a legitimate subject in American undergraduate education and a pervasive
approach to learning and to the management of universities.
Business is part of society and reflects its values. The very ordinariness of
entrepreneurship in American commerce suggests that our society prizes
originality and improvement, and the human traits that enable both. Thus,
entrepreneurship transcends business practice. It is a distinctive kind of human
agency that derives from business but can operate in any realm of human
endeavor. Entrepreneurship also is a basic exercise in social responsibility. To
suppress or constrain innovation and improvement—and their
implementation—ignores a society's needs and wants, holds it back, and
diminishes its future.
Innovative Entrepreneurship Programs at Three Kauffman Campuses
Kauffman CampusesSM Initiative, which now consists of grants totaling $48
million (and matched at least 2:1) to nineteen American colleges and
universities to spur new entrepreneurship programs across the disciplines. Below
are examples of how three Kauffman Campuses are making entrepreneurship an
important part of higher learning.
Arizona State University
InnovationSpace
In this two-semester, trans-disciplinary InnovationSpace program,
senior-level students work in teams to create unique, real-world, money-making
products that contribute to a better society. The course is taught by faculty
from industrial design, visual and communications design, engineering
entrepreneurship, industrial engineering, and marketing. Students prepare a
comprehensive proposal and also present their products to private sector groups
and university researchers to pursue options to see if products can become
commercially available to those who need them.
Purdue University
Entrepreneurial Leadership Academy
This Academy selects ten Purdue faculty members annually to meet monthly in a
series of workshops, lunches, dinners, and meetings to discuss and brainstorm
new ideas about Purdue entrepreneurship curricula. Academy members are tasked
with undertaking a high-impact project to foster campus entrepreneurship and
entrepreneurial leadership. Those selected for the Academy carry the title of
Kauffman Entrepreneurship Fellow for the year, receive an honorarium, and meet
with senior Purdue administrators and successful entrepreneur leaders from
outside the university.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
First-Year
Seminars
Freshmen in the College of Arts and Sciences at this university have an
opportunity to examine the relationship between entrepreneurship and more than
300 areas of scholarship across all disciplines through the First-Years Seminars
program. Students can choose from a variety of topics relating to a wide range
of disciplines. For example, in Biologists as Entrepreneurs, students learn how
to write grant proposals to support research; in another area called Economic
Saints and Villains: The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Early English Literature,
students explore how England—from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
centuries—envisioned new economic orders through plays and novels.
For more information about the Foundation’s Kauffman CampusesSM Initiative,
visit kauffman.org/campuses. |
Why Entrepreneurship Belongs in College
Four reasons justify a significant role for entrepreneurship in contemporary
American higher education. First, entrepreneurship is critical to success in the
contemporary global economy. Second, entrepreneurship is already an expanding
area of American college learning. Third, through innovation and
commercialization, entrepreneurship is becoming a basic part of what
universities themselves do. Fourth, entrepreneurship achieves key goals of a
quality American undergraduate education. To neglect entrepreneurship distances
university learning from the world it is supposed to help students learn to
understand.
How it Fits
Entrepreneurship is a field of study that creates its own subject matter and
requires the market to be consequential. Therefore, education in
entrepreneurship operates along a continuum from the professional to the
amateur. At one end, education in entrepreneurship must be about the
entrepreneur—the practitioner—and must give students the technical skills to
devise and sustain new enterprises. At the other end, entrepreneurship education
also must be for the amateur, the consumer. Broad education in and about
entrepreneurship can help students who are not entrepreneurs understand the
skills and intelligence, and the political, cultural, and economic
infrastructure that enable new enterprises to emerge.
Because American colleges and universities have discrete histories and
purposes, and serve a variety of educational functions with increasingly diverse
age groups, entrepreneurship cannot be a "one size fits all" discipline.
Therefore, the Panel does not prescribe a single set of educational practices.
Rather, it encourages America's educational communities to develop the kinds of
entrepreneurship education—along the continuum just outlined—appropriate to
their goals, stakeholders, and resources. Education in entrepreneurship needs to
be as responsive to the concreteness and integrity of its varied markets as is
entrepreneurship itself.
Entrepreneurship in General Education and the Disciplines
Entrepreneurship is appropriate for both general education (university-wide,
trans-disciplinary education, where students acquire the fundamentals of
learning that they can then apply to more specialized areas of study and to the
rest of their lives) and to the major (the collection of courses that
constitutes an extended and integrated program of learning in a particular
subject).
In general education, entrepreneurship shows concretely how cultural values,
social institutions, economic policies, and legal practices interrelate to shape
human behavior. In so doing, the broad study of entrepreneurship helps prepare
students for informed citizenship.
Entrepreneurship easily can be integrated into discrete subjects—history,
education, sociology, music, and politics—but it also can shape the major
itself. An entrepreneurial approach to the major would stress both the mastery
of basic information and insight into the new ideas that have altered a field
over time. This kind of program of learning can help students learn to innovate
about what they know and make innovation a basic part of their educational
experience and discourse. Students are more likely to practice innovation if
their education values it. To change the character of the major likely will
require the participation of academic learned societies and accrediting
agencies, which often establish the educational requirements for their
fields.
The same arguments apply with even greater force to graduate and professional
studies. In principle, graduate education need not be inimical to the creation
of new enterprises. An entrepreneurial climate can offer an enriched perspective
on the consequences of pure research.
Entrepreneurship in the Co-curriculum
By its very nature, entrepreneurship in college cannot be limited to the
classroom. For students drawn to business or engaged in addressing persisting
social problems, entrepreneurship's emphasis on implementing new enterprises
provides a constructive and practical outlet for their natural idealism and its
associated enthusiasm. It can help them see how to solve problems and get things
done. Entrepreneurship is among a handful of careers that students can pursue
while they are in college. Student entrepreneurs integrate learning with the
off-campus world of work, problem solving, and achievement.
Entrepreneurship and the Management of Universities
A key task of American higher education is to establish innovation and its
implementation as core educational goals. An educational culture of "curricular
entrepreneurship" would create budgetary practices and incentive structures to
reward faculty and departments for curricular innovations, fresh
interdisciplinary partnerships, and experiments with new methods of teaching and
learning that foster creativity and originality. Similarly, in the areas of
research and tenure, universities should treat translational research as basic
research, and the "measure of impact" of research should be part of the review
for tenure and promotion.
Conclusion
As the world's natural resources ebb and technology advances, humanity
increasingly will live by its wits. Innovation alone will not suffice. We will
need people who know how to implement new ideas and make them accessible to
large populations. We will have to build and maintain an entrepreneurial
society. Because innovation and discovery animate and are the most consequential
results of American university learning, entrepreneurship is higher education's
authentic and natural ally.
To download a copy of the Panel's full report, visit
www.kauffman.org/panelreport
