In the first round of the Kauffman Campuses Initiative (KCI) eight U.S. universities received a total of $25 million in five-year grants, with a requirement to raise at least $75 million in matching funds for interdisciplinary entrepreneurship programs. A second round in 2006 added nine more institutions and another $25 to $35 million in grants, ultimately supporting entrepreneurship programming at roughly 19 colleges and universities across the country.
Kauffman Campuses was the first initiative of its kind to ask universities to embed entrepreneurship across disciplines (in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing, education, and the humanities) rather than fund a single center in the business school. Campuses used KCI funding to:
- Create minors and certificates open to any major
- Train non-business faculty to teach entrepreneurship
- Build cross-campus courses and venture competitions
By requiring significant matching funds and senior-level commitment, the initiative pushed universities to institutionalize entrepreneurship, not treat it as a short-term grant project.
Between Kauffman’s grants and institutional matches, KCI helped catalyze roughly $300 million in entrepreneurship education activity on campuses between 2003 and 2013. By the early 2010s, entrepreneurship had effectively “come of age” in higher education with thousands of courses, majors, and minors across the country, and many universities pointed directly to Kauffman Campuses as a key accelerant. For the Foundation, Kauffman Campuses stands as a classic field-building play: a time-limited set of big, strategic grants that permanently changed how universities think about preparing students to solve problems and create new ventures, regardless of their discipline.