A publicAtion of the nAtionAl AssociAtion for communit y ... publicAtion of the nAtionAl AssociAtion for communit y college entrepreneurship Community College Spring/Summer 2010 entrepreneurship

A p u b l i c A t i o n o f t h e n A t i o n A l A s s o c i A t i o n f o r c o m m u n i t y c o l l e g e e n t r e p r e n e u r s h i p

Community CollegeS p r i n g / S u m m e r 2 0 1 0 entrepreneurship

Defining EntrepreneurshipstArting A DiAlogue on the meAning of the “e” in nAcce

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Article topicsOur publication is written for two community college audiences: ▪ Administrators who are charged with establishing, building community

support for, and finding funding for entrepreneurship education programs. ▪ Faculty members who teach entrepreneurship education and are interested

in new ideas about course content and ways to engage students in the topic of entrepreneurship.

All Articles published Are from nAcce members or pArtnersDue to the high volume of material received, the journal focuses on how-to/

advice articles, opinion pieces and scholarly articles. Most program news and announcements are posted on the Member News section of the NACCE Web site instead of being published in the journal.

We are interested in articles that tell us how you are overcoming challeng-es, pushing through setbacks, and achieving successes in your entrepreneur-ship programs. Articles that inform our readers of how they can design and market their programs are of great interest as is information on collaborations with other organizations and descriptions of innovative programs. Practical advice on how to do something better with step-by-step instructions is always welcome. Articles on innovative course content are also welcome.

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4 community college entrepreneurshipspring/summer 2010

Anyone who has been a regular reader of Community College Entre-preneurship since this journal was launched in 2007 can’t help but be amazed at the scope and innovativeness of the entrepreneurship educa-tion and support programs being undertaken by NACCE members all across America and even abroad. As article after article makes clear, community colleges are being extremely entrepreneurial as they em-brace the mission of helping the members of their community gain the knowledge and skills needed to start their own business, take an existing business to new levels of success, or be an outstanding intrapreneur.

The breadth of the entrepreneurship programs on member campuses raises a natural question that we tackle in the lead article of this issue: What is entrepreneurship and, more specifically, what is it in the context of the community college environment and mission? This article is the start of a dialogue that we hope you will continue with us online at the NACCE Web site.

We will also discuss the NACCE definition of entrepreneurship at the 8th Annual NACCE Conference, scheduled for October 10-13 at the Lowes Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando in Orlando, FL.

Under the banner of “Entrepreneurship: The Community College Role in Economic Vitality,” you will meet and network with fellow college professionals also committed to creating positive organizational change, receive immediate answers and solutions to issues that impact your community college, identify opportunities and entrepreneurship ef-forts from other NACCE members, and discover how to influence your community’s economic future.

The 4th Annual NACCE Symposium for Community College Entre-preneurship is being held at the same venue on October 10. The Sym-posium is a great place for sharing best practices, and past sessions have won rave reviews from attendees.

Registration for both events is now open at NACCE.com. I encourage you to join us in Orlando. I promise you it will be a real learning experi-ence in the best tradition of NACCE!

Kevin E. Drumm, PhDChair, NACCE Board of DirectorsPresident, SUNY/Broome Community College

Board ChairKevin DrummPresident SUNY/Broome Community College

Vice ChairSheila OrtegoPresident Santa Fe Community College

TreasurerRon ThomasPresident Dakota County Technical College

SecretaryMelody KamererOwner Hudson Business Service

Gail CarberryPresident Quinsigamond Community College

Cem ErdemPresident & CEO Augusoft Inc.

Tom Goodrow NACCE Founder

Monte PadenCIS/Business Instructor West Hills Community College – Lemoore

Karen StoutPresidentMontgomery County Community College

Noah BrownPresident & CEOAssociation for Community College Trustees

Colleagues in entrepreneurship:

NACCEBoard ofDirectors


Contents

Defining Entrepreneurship

Picture This: The League for Innovation Conference

10 Lessons Learned After Five Years

12 A Path of Educational Opportunities

16 Dizzying Heights Made Safe

18 Mississippi’s MyBiz Program

19 Feeding Rural Entrepreneurship Needs

23 Serving Entrepreneurs on Florida’s Gold Coast

8 Guest Columnist

11 New Paradigms27 Sharon A. Curry

9 Bunker Hill CC and Simmons College Collaborate on Entrepreneurship Expert Assist Program

25 Sherry Tshibangu Is 2010 NISOD Award Winner

columnsmember spotlight

news note

stories

6

Community College Entrepreneurship is published quarterly as a member benefit by the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship. Articles from members may be submitted via e-mail to [email protected]. Publisher: Heather Van SickleEditor: Jeanne YocumCreative Director: Peter Ellis

NACCE serves two audiences: college administrators and faculty mem-bers. In recognition of this, with this issue we are introducing icons for each audience that will help steer readers towards news articles that should be of special interest to them. Of course, some articles contain content that is of interest to both groups, so they will feature both icons.

editor’s note:

college administrators

faculty members

14 Young Entrepreneur

20 Q&A Corner

24 Marketing on a Shoestring


Defining EntrepreneurshipstArting A DiAlogue on the meAning of the “e” in nAcce

Who is an entrepreneur? What is entrepreneurship? What does it mean to be entrepreneurial?

Ask a roomful of NACCE members to agree on a definition of entrepreneurship and you are bound to have a lively and lengthy discussion. But will this defini-tion of entrepreneurship be the same one you’d get if you asked state legislators, business owners, program funders, or traditional and nontraditional college students to hold a similar discussion? Possibly not.

And therein lies the challenge. If NACCE members and their key con-stituencies do not share a common understanding of what entrepreneurship is, how can we be sure our message about the importance and application of entrepreneurship education at commu-nity colleges will be understood by these critical audiences?

NACCE Executive Director Heather Van Sickle, puts it this way: “To provide clarity to members and to the com-munities our members serve, we are beginning a dialogue seeking to define entrepreneurship and its application in the community college setting.” That’s the task NACCE has set for itself–de-veloping a shared definition of entrepre-neurship that members can communicate to their key constituencies. If everyone is using the same “game plan”, then helping others understand the value and scope of entrepreneurship education as it is being practiced on community college campuses nationwide will be easier.

in the beginning–who is An entrepreneur?

So let’s start at the beginning. The word “entrepreneur” originated with

the French word “entreprendre,” which means “to undertake.” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines an entrepre-neur as one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.

Joseph Schumpeter, a noted 20th century economist expanded on this when he wrote that an entrepreneur is “an innovator who implements change in an economy by introducing new goods or new methods of production…Schum-peter emphasized the beneficial process of creative destruction, in which the introduction of new products results in the obsolescence or failure of others.”2

In the late 20th century, manage-ment guru Peter Drucker differentiated between small business owners and entrepreneurs: “Admittedly, all new small businesses have many factors in common. But to be entrepreneurial, an enterprise has to have special charac-teristics over and above being new and small. Indeed, entrepreneurs are a minor-ity among new businesses. They create something new, something different; they change or transmute values.”3

“One of my favorite quotes from Drucker is that ‘the purpose of a business is to create a customer,’” says Les Led-ger, professor and Sam Walton Fellow of Free Enterprise at Central Texas College in Killeen, TX. “Drucker, in my opin-ion, is stating that an entrepreneur has to provide a good or service for which the customer has a need. Risk, as well as innovation, is involved in trying to create goods and services for the customer. If the customer sees no value, then there is no exchange of money between the entrepreneur and customer. The cus-tomer has to see that the good or service is worth the money that the entrepreneur needs to stay in business.”

“I think NACCE is on to something

to want to define entrepreneurship,” says Melissa Crawford, director of the Scheinfeld Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Santa Barbara City Col-lege in Santa Barbara, CA. “I find that people use the word ‘entrepreneur’ very loosely–and the general public some-times mistakenly believes that an entre-preneur is any business owner. I dis-agree. I believe an entrepreneur invents a new way of accomplishing an old task to make it more efficient, or a way to meet an existing need that hasn’t been met yet. An entrepreneur spends time critically thinking about or analyzing how to fill that gap with a new service or product. An entrepreneur improves the way ser-vices and products are delivered.”

From all of this, NACCE’s proposed definition of an entrepreneur is: an indi-vidual that develops a new or improved product, service or way of doing things that can exist independent of the creator, and bears the financial responsibility for risks in bringing their development to market.

So what of the oft-used terms entre-preneurship, self-employment, small business owner, entrepreneurial, and intrapreneur? There is a place for those terms in the community college setting as well. Let’s look at where they fit in.

Join the Conversation!

As we evolve the NACCE definition of entrepreneurship, we’d appreciate your thoughts on these questions:

▪ Do you agree/disagree with NACCE’s definitions of entrepreneurship?

▪ What are the implications of these definitions for community college administrators and for faculty? For the curriculum?

▪ How are community colleges going to innovate to provide an educational experience that serves these defini-tions of entrepreneurship?

Please visit www.cceship.blogspot.com to share your ideas.


entrepreneurshipWriting in their report “Entrepreneur-

ship in American Higher Education,” the Kauffman Panel on Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education defined entrepreneurship as “the transforma-tion of an innovation into a sustainable enterprise that generates value…entre-preneurship merges the visionary and the pragmatic.”4 Therefore, the education of entrepreneurship is the exposure to and understanding of the skills, knowledge and process of innovation and new ven-ture creation.

The Babson College definition of entrepreneurship is “a way of thinking and acting that is opportunity obsessed, holistic in approach, and leadership bal-anced.” Students in their entrepreneur-ship program “develop a broad-based entrepreneurial skill relevant to any organization–start-up, established, and for and not-for profit–in an industry.”5

For NACCE’s definition, entrepre-neurship involves consistently thinking and acting in ways designed to uncover new opportunities that are then applied to provide value. The scope of this defi-nition is precisely why entrepreneurship education belongs cross-campus and not only in the business department or as one non-credit course. Entrepreneurship provides a lens to view each discipline

through and offers an application beyond traditional employment. The real world application of entrepreneurship educa-tion will result in: entrepreneurs, the self-employed, small business start-ups, and intrapreneurs.

What all these individuals have in common is that they have an interest in creating something that didn’t exist be-fore in their community or in a broader market. And for those who are not tra-ditional entrepreneurs (i.e., not focused on innovation and market transforma-tion), they will still benefit from learning skills, such as opportunity recognition and capture and how to write a business plan that will attract funding, that are inherent to the traditional definition of entrepreneurship.

“These definitions recognize the broad range of students who turn to community colleges for knowledge that will enable them to add to the economic well-being of their communities either now or in the future,” says Van Sickle.

self-employed/smAll business ownerSo are self-employed individuals and

small business owners entrepreneurs? Based on the above NACCE definition of an entrepreneur, the answer is “no.” They are rather “replicative” entrepre-neurs, 6 “those producing or selling a

good or service already available through other sources” or what NACCE will de-fine as the self-employed or small busi-ness owners. Notice that they do bear the financial risk for their enterprise which sets them apart from an “intrapreneur” or someone acting in an entrepreneurial way inside a corporation. So they too can benefit greatly from learning the basic skills of entrepreneurship that are being taught on NACCE member campuses. And it may well be that in some cases, learning these skills will prompt the self-employed and small business owners to embrace innovation, either with new products and services or in the processes they use to operate their companies.

intrApreneur/entrepreneuriAl“Here at Southeast Community Col-

lege, we have added ‘intrapreneur’ to our definitions to include those that are entrepreneurial in their career, i.e., will-ing to take a risk in their current position to help the company succeed all while receiving a paycheck,” says Tim Mittan, director of the Entrepreneurship Center at Southeast Community College in Lincoln, NE.

“Intrapreneurs are people working within corporations who approach their work in an entrepreneurial fashion,” says Van Sickle. “Speaking at one of

continued on page 22

entrepreneur (e)

self-employed (se)/small business owner (sbo)

intrapreneur (i)/entrepreneurial (el)

Assumes financial risk

new/innovative products, services, or

processes ensuring consistent

value/growth

exists independent of creator/owner

An entrepreneur must have all three components, a se/sBO may have one or two, and i/e has one.

May/MayNot May/MayNot


Guest ColumnistAre you helping entrepreneurs plAn for the reAl WorlD?

By André Taylor Entrepreneur and Author

While we appear to be rebounding from our recent economic downturn, the con-sensus is we have miles to travel before we reach solid ground. Unemployment remains high, but with rent, mortgages, car notes, and tuition to pay, many are thinking seriously about how they can jumpstart their own economy by starting a business. Even young people-notoriously focused more on getting jobs than creating jobs-are showing interest in writing their own ticket. This has made the community college a power-ful hotbed of entrepreneurial economic opportunity.

This exciting movement in the marketplace begs the question: “Are we giving those desperately searching for economic opportunity the best chance at success?” In other words, are the entre-preneurship programs springing up all across the country at community colleges really making the grade? Are we helping or hurting the budding entrepreneur?

Those who study small business at community colleges have always been eager to put their new knowledge to work right away. Most have to. But this environment has placed new demands on community college small business pro-grams. Let’s be frank. Theory won’t cut it. Your students want to know what they learn in the classroom will really work in the real world. And many are doing their own homework, long before the college professor gives an assignment.

I have long been concerned about the quality of entrepreneurship educa-tion in colleges and universities because of the realities of teaching something many believe you can’t really teach. The problem is compounded by the resumes

of those leading the charge. Most profes-sors have not run their businesses, and many do not want to. And if they have, they are often removed from the day-to-day nuances and developments in the marketplace, meaning they may not be giving the best “stuff” to entrepreneur-ship students.

Entrepreneurs can really help in the classroom, but many entrepreneurs are unwilling to devote lengthy periods of time teaching aspiring entrepreneurs–particularly in a classroom setting. Most are concerned about how best to use their creative time to make more money and the semester format doesn’t lend itself to the entrepreneur’s ongoing involvement.

With these realities in mind, I thought I would share my view on how you might make entrepreneurship education more real at your institution during this critical time. Here are three tips:

begin with A “creAte A new life” plAnWhenever we speak about programs

aimed at helping others start their own businesses the first thing we gravitate to is the standard refrain, “Let’s write a business plan.” I would like to sug-gest this is the wrong place to begin. I believe educators should do a better job of helping entrepreneurs think more about developing their own life plan, which will shape and be influenced by the business. What kind of lifestyle do they want? How do they want to oper-ate? How much time are they prepared to devote to business building? How big do they want to grow? What kind of busi-ness culture do they want to have? How will the business change their life? While business plans can be very valuable,

they can become so abstract that the new entrepreneur never really understands the implications and opportunities of the new business and how their life is about to change.

continue with A “win the customer” plAn

Until you have a customer, you are not in business. Yet I find many en-trepreneurs are more concerned about logos, Web sites, and the latest technol-ogy than serving those living, breathing human beings known as customers. I personally think the surge in dismal customer service can be traced back to the absence of a good grounding in what it means to have and keep a customer. I would challenge educators to spend con-siderable time with new entrepreneurs in helping them understand how to market


to and service customers. The new entre-preneur must have a clear sense of who their customers are, how they think and why they would want to take advantage of their product or service. There is absolutely no replacement for in-depth customer knowledge and this is far more meaningful to the typical entrepreneur than what winds up in most business plans.

develop A “mAke money” plAnOnce you know what you want, and

what your customer wants, it’s time to really nail how you’re going to make money satisfying yourself and your customer. So often the answer to this question is buried in a 200-page busi-ness plan and the new entrepreneur never really understands how they will make money. I’m suggesting here working

Building collaboration and pathways is a Coleman Foundation priority. One way of achieving these goals is by creating internship opportunities for graduate students in community colleges. As a recipient of three Coleman Foundation Elevator Grants, Bunker Hill Community College has collaborated with Simmons College to develop and implement a very successful model whereby Simmons College places MBA Cer-tificate in Entrepreneurship students as interns (fellows) at Bunker Hill’s Community Center for Entrepre-neurship. The fellows, one per semester, work 100-125 hours, for which they receive funds to cover their tuition and some incidentals associated with the fellowship.

The Entrepreneurship Expert Assist program provides Simmons students with an opportunity to transfer their knowledge and skills to Bunker Hill Community College. The fellows provide direct counseling to entrepreneurs in areas such as opportunity analysis, development of business plan, and use of technology in business. They also develop and deliver training programs for small business owners on topics such as opportunity identification and marketing.

The students are supervised by Simmons Entrepreneurship Director Dr. Teresa Nelson in collaboration with the Dean of Professional Studies at Bunker Hill Community College, Dr. Bogusia Wojciechowska. Dr. Nelson writes: “This is a win-win proposition not just because the Certificate students are compensated for their work, but because giving back is often the best way of learning; becoming the teacher solidifies and strengthens the lessons.”

Dr. Wojciechowska adds: “Collaboration between Simmons and Bunker Hill is mutually beneficial. Simmons students have the opportunity to mentor our students and work as advisors in the Center. Our students not only benefit greatly from their experience, but are encouraged to explore higher degrees.”

neWs note

Bunker Hill CC and Simmons College Collaborate on Entrepreneurship Expert Assist Program

with the entrepreneur to develop a one or two pager that the entrepreneur can get their arms around: “If I sell this many of my product here is what we’ll gross. If I sell at this price, here is my margin and here is my profit.” The entrepreneur must have a clear understanding of the results of each transaction. You must also make sure the new entrepreneur understands that in most cases a sale is not the same as cash flow. Not understanding that can be disastrous for the new business owner.

If we help aspiring entrepreneurs understand these key elements, it will go a long way to helping them understand what it takes to succeed in the real world.

André Taylor is an entrepreneur, con-sultant, and author of the book You Can Still Win! He’s chief executive of Taylor

Insight, a New York-based leadership development firm, serving entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies. He’s a regular contributor to ABC News Money Matters, and a community college grad-uate. More at www.andretaylor.com.


Lessons Learned After Five YearsioWA’s stAteWiDe business plAn competition

By Jamie T. Zanios Vice President North Iowa Area Community College, Mason City

The North Iowa Area Community Col-lege’s (NIACC) John Pappajohn Entre-preneurial Center (JPEC) was instru-mental in the conception and launching of the John Pappajohn Iowa Business Plan Competition. The concept for the competition was to help meet one part of our mission, stimulating entrepreneur-ship. Engaging the directors of the other JPEC’s, which are located on the campus of the three regent universities (Universi-ty of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa) and Drake University, it was collectively agreed that we would approach our primary benefactor to support this competition. When he agreed to support the competi-

tion by funding the prizes, we launched the effort. You can view the rules and timeline at www.iowabusinessplancom-petition.com.

The reasons to start a business plan competition can be several; in our case it was about engaging with more start-up businesses to help them with their busi-ness planning through our centers. We enlisted the support and collaboration of the Iowa Department of Economic Development (IDED), Small Business Development Centers and the Iowa Busi-ness Accelerators, all of which play a role in supporting the planning effort by businesses and are also represented on the judging panel.

benefits to All pArticipAntsWhat have we learned over the past

five years? First is that over 300 busi-nesses have participated and many have gone on to grow and create jobs and wealth as a result. Many businesses have sought support for their business plan-ning that would not have done so without the motivation of the competition. The companies that have received funding as a result of winning one of the top prizes have been significantly assisted with that “free money” in their efforts to launch and grow their businesses. The public-ity has been helpful for those that won or were in the finals in their pursuit of business and additional funding. The


Finalists in the John Pappajohn Iowa Business Plan Competition for 2008 meet on stage with John Pappajohn (far right): (L-R): Suresh Kothari, Ensoft Enabling Software; Dr. Johnny Wong, EndoMetric; Tim Woods, TMT Manufacturing.


New Paradigms entrepreneurship ADDresses both unemployment AnD unDeremployment

By Felix Haynes, President, Hillsborough Community College, Plant City Campus and Tom Tankersley, Grants Coordinator, Hillsborough Community College, Plant City Campus

As the U.S. economy begins navigating itself out of the most significant econom-ic downturn since the Great Depression, it appears the course set for recovery may be one that demands endurance and requires a significant restructuring of the country’s labor force. With so much emphasis over the last few years on the Labor Department’s figures on unem-ployment, less attention has been paid to another major factor stifling economic recovery–underemployment.

The underemployed are defined as members of the labor force working part-time, when they would prefer to work full-time, as well as those individuals working below their respective skill level or outside of their area of expertise. The computer engineer working at Starbucks, the laid-off factory worker with two part-time retail jobs, and the registered nurse working as a home-help aide all represent the underemployed class. As a

recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out, the effect of the underemployed should not be minimized. With consumer spending making up such a significant part of the nation’s economy, the under-employed, with their lower incomes and higher expenses towards benefits they once received in fulltime positions, sim-ply cannot spend as they once did.

Perhaps as one response of employ-ers to the recession, this class of workers continues to grow as recovery remains stalled. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, since the recession began over two years ago the number of people involuntarily working part-time jobs has more than doubled to 9.3 million. Recently, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke raised the issue of underemployment in a speech to the Economic Club of New York. Bernanke pointed out that the rate of underemploy-ment is rising at a rate faster than during previous recessions, while the average workweek has dwindled to 33 hours. How to address the under-utilization of labor in this country is an important question, and its answer is directly tied to the future health of the U.S. economy.

A solution

Entrepreneurship can provide part of the solution to the underemployment problem. Noted author and business thinker Peter Drucker summed it up succinctly, “Entrepreneurs innovate and innovation is a central ingredient to economic growth.” But hasn’t the cur-rent economic climate stifled entrepre-neurship? Some indicators suggest this premise to be false.

The Kauffman Foundation’s 2009 Index of Entrepreneurial Activity shows

a rather steady level for business forma-tion as the recent recession unfolded. In fact, the rate of entrepreneurial activity actually rose, albeit by the small percent-age of 0.30 percent, from the previous year. During 2008 this rate translated to 530,000 new businesses every month. Additionally, the Kauffman Foundation found in a recent study that nearly all net job creation in the United States between 1980 and 2005 occurred in firms less than five years old.

Maybe it should come as no sur-prise that entrepreneurial activity is not dramatically affected during economic downturns. Recessions disrupt the busi-ness world’s “status-quo” and change the way businesses operate and prioritize their practices. Often during these times businesses not only shed jobs, but also reduce risk and abandon innovation. A recent Deloitte Consulting survey found in its polling of more than 450 companies that even in the best of times business innovation is lacking, with Felix Haynes


Tom Tankersley


A Path of Educational Opportunitiesst. petersburg college moDel noW encompAssesAll fAcets of entrepreneurship eDucAtion

By Shri Goyal, Dean, College of Technology & Management James Olliver, Provost, Seminole Campus, and Sharon Setterlind, Dean, Business Technologies St. Petersburg College. St. Petersburg, FL

Entrepreneurs and small businesses create the jobs where most Americans work, and where an increasing number of young people see their future. St. Pe-tersburg College is expanding its entre-preneurship efforts by offering programs and services to different audiences. We are very excited about the promise and the opportunity to support and serve our community’s economic growth.

St. Petersburg College (SPC), located in St. Petersburg FL, was the first among Florida’s 28 public community colleges to transition to a four-year institution. In August 2002, SPC began offering fully accredited baccalaureate programs leading to bachelor’s degrees. However, SPC’s commitment to its two-year cur-riculum and program remains as strong as ever.

The goal of the entrepreneurship program at SPC is to provide entrepre-neurial business fundamentals needed for success in starting a business. The program will have components that help students generate and sharpen their entrepreneurial/intrapreneural mind set, idea generation, analysis, opportunity recognition, value creation and manage-ment of a venture using communication, marketing, sales and financial skills.

Although SPC has experienced growing success in its existing entre-preneurship offerings, recently SPC has launched an initiative to extend entrepreneurship education to support potential entrepreneurs through degree and certificate programs, as well as by offering services through an Entrepre-neurship Center. Building on the work underway in SPC’s Corporate Training’s Practical Entrepreneurship Academy and the entrepreneurship sub-plan within

the bachelor’s degree program, SPC will create a new associate-degree-level entrepreneurship degree option. Thus the entrepreneurship model will encompass all facets of entrepreneurship education: credit/non credit courses to provide “on demand” training, certificates, a two-year A.S. degree, and the four-year B.A.S. degree with the Entrepreneurship Center at its core (see fig 1).

the process: focus on prAgmAtic educAtion

At SPC we used a formal process to develop curriculum for training stu-dents for entrepreneurship ventures and intrapreneural thinking while working in large organizations. We collected data on students’ interest and conducted a needs analysis by surveying the industries in Tampa Bay. This was followed by a formal DACUM (Designing a Curricu-lum) session attended by key “poten-tial” employers of graduating students. The outcome of this session is a list of traits, attitudes and skills needed for the degree. These are carefully populated in both core and elective courses for the program, thus providing students with the knowledge needed to succeed in the field. This process has helped in designing other programs and keeping a pragmatic focus.

“on demAnd” corporAte trAiningIn December 2006, an entrepreneur

approached SPC about the need to offer a practical, mentor-based program for new local businesses and potential busi-nesses to get the assistance they needed to succeed. With a gift of $25,000 (that was matched by the State) SPC launched

the Practical Entrepreneurship Acad-emy–a 16-week, non-credit program designed to be offered as credit or non-credit courses in future programs.

Additionally, Corporate Training at SPC hosts numerous six-week classes under Business Solutions: Entrepreneur-ship/Small Business. These courses are designed for specific entrepreneurial venues such as: how to start and operate your own publishing business, cater-ing service, consulting practice, interior design, and arts and crafts. Also offered by Business Solutions are foundational courses in creating a business plan, Internet business writing, marketing, and business law.

AssociAte degree progrAm And certifi-cAtion options

In 2009, a study was conducted to review best practices in entrepreneurship education among community colleges to determine where SPC might better serve the Pinellas County community. The study found that SPC could play a pivotal role at the associate degree level to provide an integrated package of education coordinating with the program offered in Corporate Training, and the existing entrepreneurship sub-plan of-fered at the four-year level.

In developing the curriculum to support the entrepreneurship model, it was decided to focus on a four-course certificate–an industry-driven model of 12 credits that could be offered as a sub-plan to the A.S. Business Administration degree, which in turn could articulate with the College’s bachelor’s degree offerings. This decision was based on the fact that a college credit certificate


consists of a program of instruction of college-level courses that is a part of an A.S. degree program that prepares students for entry into employment. This decision was based also on the fact that the business degree provides the foundation to give students skills in management, marketing and finance as the four courses are expected to focus on practical skills and engagement with experts in their respective fields. This will be accomplished using simulations, group work and other media-based and electronic tools to appeal to the “entre-preneurial personality.”

The courses in the Entrepreneur-ship certificate program will include: “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” (to focus the business idea and examine the various components of starting and running a business); “Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing” (to address topics ranging from advertising options to new social media);“Entrepreneurial Manage-ment” (to address topics such as taxes, bookkeeping, legal issues, etc.); and “Planning the Entrepreneurial Venture” (culminating in a complete business plan).

In addition to being part of the busi-ness associate degree, it is anticipated that the courses, individually or as part of a certificate, will be valued additions to the other A.S. degree programs, there-by providing students in programs such as photography, digital arts, hospitality, insurance, financial services, computer programming and music with the skills to start their own businesses.

bAs-entrepreneurship sub-plAn in mAnAgement & orgAnizAtionAl leAder-ship

The Entrepreneurship specialization has been offered as a sub-plan in the Bachelor of Applied Science in Manage-ment and Organizational Leadership de-gree for the last two years. This program has been expanded. It now consists of four three-credit-hour courses: Principles of Entrepreneurship; Innovation & Value Creation; Sales, Negotiation & Relation-ship Management; and Entrepreneurial Finance. The sub-plan also includes a three-credit-hour senior capstone course that makes use of skills learned in the courses in planning and early execution

of a business. The program offers hands-on entrepreneurship incubator experi-ence and contact with entrepreneurs and successful businesses by hosting a series of seminars. It also offers additional support through working relationships and articulation agreements with local universities.

entrepreneurship cAreer centerProviding courses in practical entre-

preneurship alone is vitally important, and its value increases when paired with an integrated series of services and ac-tivities. SPC is adopting the model suc-cessfully developed at the University of Miami, where extended entrepreneurship services are housed in and coupled with the work of the Career Center. At SPC the traditional Career Center offers many services to current students in selecting career direction, developing a career plan, and obtaining occupational, indus-try and labor market data. The traditional Career Center also provides information on how to find employment, develop a resume and prepare for the interview. The role of the new Entrepreneurship/Career Center will be to extend those

services and complement and supple-ment the academic programs by work-ing with students in the entrepreneur-ship courses and programs to identify mentors, make referrals to community resources, and promote activities, events and host seminar series.

In the next few months, SPC will

bring local small business entrepreneurs and representatives from area organi-zations together in a collaborative lab environment to help develop the Entre-preneurship/Career Center. The group will examine the services of the Center and help develop the structure, activities and partnerships to complement the cur-riculum to maximize success. The group will also discuss where SPC should look for support and methods of identifying the students who would benefit from participation. This will be a good op-portunity to begin an advisory committee for the center.

An advisory committee plays an im-portant role in maintaining and expand-ing the programs of SPC by assessing how the program meets employer needs;


BAS Entrepreneurship Sub-Plan

general education courses core courses (30 credits) specialization (32 credits)

Communication, Finance, Marketing, Leadership, Strategic Management, Program Management

includes :Capstone Course (3 cr)

MAN 3802 Principles of Entrepreneurship

new Venture Fundamentals; entrepreneurship Concepts; Focus on Customer

MAR 4836 Innovation & Value Creation

researching the marketplace for opportunities; Value Creation; Differentiation

FIN 3XXX – Entrepreneurial Finance

new Venture Capital, Working Capital management, Budgeting and Forecasting

MAR 4413 – Sales, Negotiation and Relationship Management

sales strategy; prospecting; sales Forecasting; relationship Building and negotiating

15 - 21 Credits


young entrepreneurs

Christian Hendricks (21) is the founder of Sagitta Marketing (http://marketingbysagitta.com), a full-service marketing firm for small businesses started in 2009. It provides everything from graphic design to promotional products.

Recently, Christian won the Rising Star Entrepre-neur Award by The Entrepreneurs Exchange and the 1st place prize in the Anne Arundel Commu-nity College (AACC) Business Plan Competition. Christian currently attends AACC and will graduate in May 2010.

Q & A with Christian Hendricks

Q: This being your first business, what inspired you to start a business?

A: One of my mentors (Justin Jones-Fosu) told me, “Even if you start small, start now,” so I did. I have always envi-sioned owning my own company. As a young kid, I used to sell candy in school. I used to cut grass and contracted five to ten individuals to help me.

Being an entrepreneur is better than I thought it would be. I love going to work every day. Half the time it doesn’t even feel like work (unlike the Fortune 500 company I resigned from). I love that I have the opportunity to help people be successful and live out their dreams.

Q: What has been your biggest chal-lenge in starting your business?

A: My biggest challenge in start-ing my firm was credibility, or the lack thereof. When I started the firm I was 19 and in my second year of college. The

feedback I received for why propos-als were not being accepted was due to perceived youth and inexperience. Since then I have worked twice as hard as my competitors, if not more, to be competi-tive. I focused on building my image, or-ganic growth with core clients, and using their testimonies to gain new business. I improved my understanding of how to deliver value to prospective clients.

Q: How long can you see yourself be-ing an entrepreneur?

A: I will be an entrepreneur for the rest of my life! Even now, I’m thinking through my next several ventures in the future.

Q: What programs at your school were

the most helpful in starting and growing your business?

A: I owe my success to the Entrepre-neurial Studies Institute (ESI) at AACC

as a whole. If I had to narrow it down to one program, it would be the Student-Business Owner Incubator program. I was given office space, meeting space, computers, and everything a start-up would need to be successful. But the most important benefit was the access to experienced advisors. My advisors are experts in the areas of accounting, busi-ness law, marketing, human resources and management. All of my advisors are successful entrepreneurs.

Q: What do you think the most im-portant things community colleges can do to help encourage and support young entrepreneurs are?

A: For community colleges to ef-fectively help entrepreneurs, they need interactive and relevant curriculum. The classes have to be set up in a way that it’s not so much about a grade, but student specific and focused. Everything done in class should focus on a student being able to form an idea, create a plan and execute. At AACC you work on your idea and form it into a busi-ness plan. Then the professors help you develop strategies that will help you be successful.

Q: What advice would you give to a community college student who has no entrepreneurship experience and wants to start a business?

A: The advice I would give to some-one looking to start a business would be to plan. Writing a business plan is the most important way to better your chances of success. When you plan out what you want to do, it allows you to prepare for pitfalls that may come. For example, you think you need $20,000 and later you discover you actually need $40,000. You would have found this out through your research and not six months into operation.

About columnist

Michael Simmons (28), a bestselling author and award-winning entrepreneur, is the co-founder and CEO of the Extreme Entre-preneurship Tour (EET) and a past keynote speaker at NACCE. EET brings the country’s top young entrepreneurs to college campuses to spread the entrepreneurial mindset during a half-day conference. Started in 2006, the tour (www.extremetour.org) has visited over 130 schools nation-wide.


reviewing and making recommendations on the program curric-ulum; providing input to help prepare students for the workforce and in building community relations.

By expanding the scope of entrepreneurship programs at SPC, we are able to offer a full range of alternative options to our students in earning BAS, AS, certificate and on-demand training using credit and non-credit courses. The proposed entre-preneurship model will be accomplished by a solid foundation of applied skills including developing ideas and creating value by assessing problems and opportunities; gathering funding for a start-up; managing capital and forecasting sales; managing business operations; and the ability to strategically plan, assess risks, and negotiate and balance customer demands.

Our entrepreneurship graduates will serve both new and existing businesses, large and small. As entrepreneurs, they will start and grow new business; and, as intrapreneurs, transform businesses into higher quality and more profitable units though their entrepreneurial thinking. The model will articulate a path of educational opportunities for current and future entrepreneurs from non-credit workshops through a bachelor’s degree. Also, the program will connect students to the community through the Entrepreneurship/Career Center and offer an alternate training program for non-degree seeking students interested in certificates. SPC is excited to forge partnerships with students, entrepreneurs and successful businesses via this connection of academics, business and community. We are very optimistic!

continued from page 13

A Pathcontinued from page 11

New Paradigms

31% of surveyed companies responding that innovation happens “by accident” in their company. Contrast this with the fact that, according to the Small Business Administration, small technology com-panies produce 13 times more patents per employee than large firms.

A criticAl AdvAntAgeSimply stated, during both deep

recessions and economic boom periods, entrepreneurs are in a unique position to transform ideas into tangible (and hope-fully profitable) innovation. Many of the workers classified as underemployed are in a unique position as well. Now, perhaps for the first time in their careers they may seriously examine the possibil-ity of starting their own small business. Using their experience and individual skills they may be able to stabilize their personal financial situations, while play-ing a significant role in promoting eco-nomic growth within their communities.

As recent history shows, businesses founded during weak economic times have been instrumental in the develop-ment of many significant innovations on the market today. Companies such as Sun Microsystems, Compaq Computer Co., and Adobe Systems all had their beginnings in the recession of the early 1980s and today stand as examples of entrepreneurs who searched for oppor-tunity, responded to it, and concentrated their efforts on effective innovation.

It should also be noted that one crucial advantage for potential entrepreneurs exists for the unemployed and under-employed of this recession that was not in place 30 years ago– education. Five hundred colleges and universities cur-rently grant entrepreneurship degrees. In today’s economic climate, with reports that over 6 million of the currently unemployed have been searching for gainful employment for six months or longer, these entrepreneurship programs are poised to produce today’s entrepre-neurs who will be better prepared to drive tomorrow’s economic growth. Figure 1.

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Dizzying Heights Made Safe the lifeline of entrepreneurship eDucAtion

By Ronald E. Thomas, Ph.D. President, Dakota County Technical College, Rosemount, MN

Conventional thinking paints entrepre-neurs as individuals equipped with a high tolerance for risk. That same think-ing points to the successful entrepreneur as a business-minded independent who not only recognizes a previously unseen opportunity, but also has the know-how and vision to make that opportunity un-fold and flourish in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of entrepreneur-ship education, the difference between an entrepreneur scaling new summits with a flag or hitting bottom with a shovel is a powerful bundle of skills and knowledge. When delivered with dedica-tion and a strong grasp of real-world conditions, that bundle is the entrepre-neur’s lifeline to success.

I recently took part in a grant signing ceremony that brought home the concept of entrepreneurial education as a lifeline. The event kicked off a $300,000 train-ing grant from the Minnesota Job Skills Partnership (MJSP) to our college, which is teaming up with Capital Safety–the world leader in the design and manufac-ture of height safety and fall protection equipment–to deliver critical training programs to employees at the company’s state-of-the-science production and test-ing facility in Red Wing, MN.

true workforce engAgementDuring the course of my career as an

educator, I have participated in my share of grant signing ceremonies. All are happy occasions, but many are simply formal announcements populated by the designated signatories, a smattering of guests, a photographer or two, and per-haps a representative from area media.

The event at Capital Safety raised the bar for workforce engagement. I arrived

at the signing site with an ample col-lege contingent–one vice president, two deans, two customized training directors and one communications coordinator. We quickly found ourselves outnum-bered by more than 350 Capital Safety employees, who had gathered to cel-ebrate the grant.

Capital Safety-Americas President David Thomas, MJSP Director Paul Moe and Red Wing Mayor John Howe mirrored my duties as a signatory. They, along with the DCTC contin-gent, picked up on the positive energy emanating from the assembled workers, who listened, attentive and smiling, as their president reviewed the company’s superb performance over the past year before describing the DCTC training programs that would augment the skill range of every employee present, stream-lining career pathways in such areas as wind energy, mechatronics, green manufacturing, supervisory management and advanced computer training.

It’s no secret that entrepreneurial thinking goes well beyond the lone enterpriser making the grueling ascent to prosperity through the force of a brave, new idea. The revitalizing boons of in-trapreneurship can serve as the lifeblood of the largest and most mature corpo-rations, institutions and concerns. At Capital Safety, entrepreneurial attitudes permeate all aspects of the organization. Suggestion boxes at the Red Wing facil-ity generate more than 100 innovative ideas and observations a week. Champi-oned by every contributor to the Capital Safety mission, which centers on saving lives around the world in the transporta-tion, oil and gas, construction, utilities, and wind energy industries, the quest for

improved quality and efficiency never stops, evidenced by a creative progres-sion that notches more patents than any other company in the fall protection field.

Capital’s management team includes shop-floor workers in the decision-mak-ing process, fostering a workforce that cares deeply about manufacturing the best fall protection equipment possible. They live and breathe the company mot-to: “Build safe so that they stay safe.”

three key lessonsAs two-year colleges across the nation

continue to expand entrepreneurship pro-grams, we as administrators can garner three key lessons from the business cul-ture at Capital Safety. First, we should remember that many major companies, including Fortune 500 juggernauts like Apple, Nordstrom, eBay and Electronic Data Systems, started organically from humble entrepreneurial blueprints. Capi-tal itself originated 60 years ago in Sala, Sweden, when the company’s founders introduced the world’s first self-retract-ing lifeline for use by workers in local silver mines.

Second, we have to understand that teaching entrepreneurship is more than just delivering a smart and relevant cur-riculum. In every institutional undertak-ing, we must think and act as highly capable entrepreneurs, constantly search-ing for new opportunities, purposeful innovations and mutually constructive partnerships. How can we teach effective risk management unless we ourselves are both experienced and accomplished at taking bold yet intelligent risks?

Third, we need to emulate Capital Safety’s commitment to quality, which is


founded on the straightforward aspira-tion to save lives. After the signing ceremony, we took a tour of the facility, ending at a large wall map dotted with flags indicating workers whose lives were saved by Capital Safety products. Entrepreneurs might not be construc-tion workers treading the high steel of 100-story skyscrapers, but they often put their livelihoods on the line pursu-ing ideas that can take them to dizzying heights.

When delivering entrepreneurship education, we need to develop programs that reduce risk by providing start-to-fin-ish support. We need to live and breathe our mission of educating savvy and agile entrepreneurs. We need to build safe so that they stay safe.

Capital Safety workers attend grant signing with Dakota County Technical College


Mississippi’s MyBiz Program trAining DislocAteD WorKers to become entrepreneurs

By John J. Woods, PhD. Vice President of Economic Development and Workforce Training Hinds Community College, Raymond, MS

Mississippi’s MyBiz entrepreneurship training program is preparing to launch its Phase III effort targeting dislocated workers to receive entrepreneurship training through Hinds Community Col-lege. With continued funding via the WIRED Grant through The Montgomery Institute of Meridian, MS, and partner-ship linkages with the state Small Busi-ness Development Centers coordinated by the University of Mississippi-Oxford, the Mississippi Department of Employ-ment Security-WIN Job Centers, the Southern Entrepreneur Program (SEP) developed by Dr. Brent Hales at the University of Southern Mississippi-Hat-tiesburg, and the Mississippi Association of Community and Junior Colleges (all 15 state community and junior col-leges) have teamed together to develop and deliver entrepreneurship training to dislocated workers.

progrAm proceduresThe pathway to participation in the

MyBiz Phase III program initiates with local WIN Job Centers identifying pro-spective participants for the 33-hour SEP training course. Identified dislocated workers will be presented the SBDC “First Steps” seminar, which provides orientation and assessment as to whether entrepreneurship is a right fit for these individuals in their current situation.

Dislocated worker participants com-pleting the First Steps seminar will be referred to the community college My-Biz SEP instructor. Those interested will sign up for the SEP program training course and pay a $25 registration fee to cover the costs of course materials. The recommended practical working class size is to be 15 clients.

Client participants in the Southern Entrepreneurship Program receive a cer-tificate upon completion of the 33-hour training course. The targeted completion rate is 75 percent. The Hinds Community College SEP trainer then will direct the completed participants to the local Small Business Development Center at Hinds Community College.

The Hinds Community College SBDC enters clients into their small business advisement system and provides needed services requested by the clients. Ideally, some of the participants in the program will eventually develop viable small business plans leading to the opening of a small business in the Hinds Communi-ty College district’s region as a stimulus to local economic development efforts.

the sep trAining curriculum The Southern Entrepreneurship Pro-

gram curriculum consists of 14 sections of training in Entrepreneurial Skills and Business Management to include the fol-lowing topics:

▪ Orientation/Assessment ▪ Setting Goals ▪ Problem Solving ▪ Decision Making ▪ Self Esteem ▪ Values/attitudes/mindset ▪ Communication skills ▪ Managing change ▪ Why businesses fail ▪ Identifying business opportunities ▪ Networking ▪ The business plan ▪ Record keeping for success ▪ Is your business legally and finan-

cially sound

Again, the recommendation is for a course totaling 33 hours of contact training to be held in three-hour sessions, once a week, or a suitable schedule to be worked out between the clients and the community college SEP instructor. Ide-ally SEP classes would be conducted on site at the local WIN Job Centers where other support resource services are avail-able to the clients.

globAl goAlsThe end goal of the MyBiz Phase III-

SEP is to encourage dislocated workers to consider entrepreneurship opportuni-ties as an alternative to traditional em-ployment pursuits. This will be accom-plished as a result of the SEP training and SBDC advisement. Hinds Com-munity College will continue to moni-tor the participants in the MyBiz SEP program to address any further training or advisement needs they may have. This could include providing additional skills training in business development and management, computer skills, bookkeep-ing, business marketing, or other techni-cal assistance as required.

Statewide, the TMI initiative to be delivered through the state’s commu-nity colleges hopes to train up to 1,000 dislocated workers in the SEP curricu-lum. Participants outside of the clients certified by the WIN Job Centers as dislocated workers will be permitted to attend the SEP training course; however, these individuals will be required to pay a course fee of $200. Their participation costs will not be covered by the WIRED grant funding secured by The Montgom-ery Institute.

The immediate outcomes of the MyBiz Phase III-SEP program will be



connect to nacceconnect to nacce

Feeding Rural Entrepreneurship Needs A menu of community outreAch

By Beth Pridday Director, Business & Entrepreneurial Services MN State Community and Technical College, Detroit Lakes, MN

Over the past several months the demand and interest in bringing a variety of topic-specific outreach workshops related to entrepreneurship and business ownership to our community of Detroit Lakes and the surrounding region has been exploding. The small business owner and the wanna-be-business owner (aka entrepreneur) want to gain the information needed to jump start their businesses, learn ways to enhance their critical skills and relationships needed both inside and outside their businesses, and focus on developing real-life skills needed to execute and achieve results.

Our BES (Business & Entrepreneurial Services) located on the campus of MN State Community and Technical College in the heart of the region in Detroit Lakes, MN (pop. 8,100) is being seen as the entrepreneurial source for communities such as Menahga (pop. 1,100), Sebeka (pop. 650), Park Rapids (pop. 3,600), Wadena (pop. 3,900), Frazee (pop. 1,300) and more, all located within a 60-mile radius.

AppetizersTo fill this role, we have developed a menu of offerings, beginning with one- and

two-hour workshops. Featuring unique and diverse topics such as Polish Your Pitch, How to Treat Your Customers, Small Business Legal 101, A Low Tech Look at High Tech Solutions, What’s Your 80/20? and How to Save Your Business $1,500 in 2 Hours, these programs will become our core of workshops that can be replicated and repeated as often as needed and requested.

mAin courseAlong with the mini-workshop format, we have devel-

oped more immersed workshop opportunities on topics that demand more class time and a deeper level of commitment by the participants, including a six-week course, The Basics of Using QuickBooks, and the 10-week course called Intro to Entrepreneurship.

These workshops and courses are being taught by profes-sionals in their trained professions, certified life and busi-ness coaches, trainers and educators and are reaching the entry level entrepreneur as well as the more mature business professional looking for personal development or to have their skills sharpened.

dessertThe residuals of these workshops are powerful. As we

continue to have more contact hours with entrepreneurs and business owners, we have seen an increase in our request for SCORE mentorship and general assistance requests coming into the BES and its director. Also, attendance at our special

Speaker Series events has increased and interest in our incubator office spaces has peaked.

plAce your orderWe see ourselves continuing to use

this not only as a ‘feeder’ for our exist-ing services, but as a revenue-generating opportunity for the BES to augment the grant dollars and pave a road for sustain-ability in the future for us. This commu-nity outreach of workshops and courses also allows us get a foothold in the region as a viable and credible resource and trainer for ‘hungry’ entrepreneurs and business owners. And, we are more than happy to serve it up.


Q&A corner

steve herbert: It is as common as it is ill informed

for entrepreneurs to be reluctant to talk about their ideas. The truth is it is easy to have ideas and very difficult to make a viable business of them. Most wannabe entrepreneurs who don’t talk about their ideas don’t get far with their business.

How can you raise money if you won’t talk about your business? Anyone, for instance, who will not openly–with-out a nondisclosure agreement in place–discuss their ideas will not be likely to get VC money since most VCs most of the time will not sign nondisclosure agreements.

How can you sell if you won’t talk about your product? The most needed skill in startups is sales. Why make life more difficult by not talking about some supposedly secret aspect of your busi-ness. Here is a personal case: I purchased a company in 1993. The valuation was $0. They had repeatedly failed to meet their sales goals. They did not want to tell their users how the product worked.

Q:

A:

How do instructors deal with business idea confidentiality when it comes to sharing ideas during classroom discussions? I have a number of students who don’t want to share ideas, fearing that other students will steal their concepts.

When this question was posed on NACCE’s listserv we decid-ed to ask experts outside the NACCE community to respond. They all agreed that business ideas are rarely stolen. However, cases such as the much-publicized lawsuit against Facebook’s founders, who were accused by fellow Harvard students of pilfering their idea, might cause students to be reluctant to ex-pose their ideas in class, despite the fact that the relationship that led to the Facebook lawsuit took place outside of class. Here is the advice four experts provided:

The users were scientists who refused to buy the product without knowing what was inside. After we acquired the company we published a paper disclos-ing exactly how the algorithms worked. The product is now a $20m line. To this day no one has copied it. And I have to admit it’s a pretty neat idea, a really ter-rific implementation but the secret sauce ended up being how to sell it.

Most ideas that entrepreneurs feel are novel turn out not to be new at all. I serve on the deal review committee for an angel investment group. I am stunned by how often the same idea turns up multiple times often within the same few months.

Secrecy has its place but has serious limitations. Anyway, your students do not need to disclose their secret sauce to write a fundable business plan.

Steve Herbert is a serial entrepreneur who is currently vice president of Sales & Business Development at Cytel Inc., a provider of clinical trial design services and specialized statistical software for

Classroom Confidentiality

the biopharmaceutical and medical device markets. [email protected]

robert hisrich:At one university I handled it this

way: I had every student in the class sign an NDA–it could be short one–but I didn’t sign it. I learned at MIT that when you’re in an academic position and you have a lot of different people who are in-volved with different things, you should never sign an NDA.

Now what I say to my students is that I have never heard of an instance in which an idea was shared with another student who then took that idea to start another company. The reason is that you have to have a passion to make an idea work and if you don’t have that, it’s just not going to happen. I’ve never had any problems here at Thunderbird or my years at Case Western. If you make that statement up front as the professor I don’t think you’re going to have any problems. I also point out in that same statement that first of all your ideas aren’t worth stealing; I do this in a funny way, but I’m actually serious.

One problem you will have that fac-ulty members need to think about how to handle in advance–one that I just ran into again last semester–is when the students form a team to do a project and then one or two people want to do the project and one doesn’t. This is the more serious issue. The other students really need to get the student who isn’t interested in the idea to sign a total release or that could come back to haunt them. There are plenty of examples like this where people didn’t get this sign-off and it came back to haunt them later as they took an idea forward.

Robert Hisrich is Garvin Professor of Global Entrepreneurship and director of the Walk Center for Global Entrepre-neurship at Thunderbird School of Glob-al Management in Arizona. He has been involved in founding a dozen companies and is author of three books on entre-preneurship, including Entrepreneurship Starting, Developing, and Managing a


New Enterprise, now in its 8th edition. [email protected]

roger zimmermAn:Nolo Press has a number of good

patent, copyright and trademark books for entrepreneurs; these books have very good real world approaches to situations like this. Nolo’s Patents for Beginners is a book I used to give away to prospec-tive clients so they would understand that all this stuff is not quite so mysteri-ous. That would be a good source of information for both the professor and the student. (Visit http://www.nolo.com to learn more.)

There is a tendency for students not to want to give details. When I was in the classroom, I found that students who are at an early stage quite often weren’t dis-tinguishing what would be protectable, confidential information and what ideas were such good ideas that if you looked in the U.S. Patent Office database 10 people had come up with similar things and had them patented.

If students are interested in patents and trademarks, the federal government has Web sites with basic information. Patents are being issued at a rate of about 4,000 per week and by the time

this article is published we will hit the 7,700,000th utility patent, so every week it gets harder to argue that a new innova-tion is new and non-obvious.

Roger Zimmerman is an intellec-tual property attorney with Mirick, O’Connell, DeMallie & Lougee, LLP. He has done presentations to the entre-preneurship programs at Babson Col-lege and Worcester Polytechnic Institute and also taught for 15 years at Rush Medical College & Graduate School in Chicago. [email protected]

bArry horowitz:If you can’t tell your idea to others,

you can’t receive feedback that con-firms (or denies) the attractiveness of the idea. When the “market research” behind a business idea is primarily that the founder/inventor just knows it will be great and everyone will want it, that isn’t sufficient for investors- and shouldn’t be. Talking up the core of the idea opens the student/entrepreneur up to hearing the strengths and weaknesses of the idea, and should improve the quality of the plan-and maybe of the idea– in the process.

We tell our students as a general

MassChallenge - World’s Largest Global Startup Competition

MassChallenge officially kicked off a global start-up competition with an event in Boston confirming a $1 million prize pool and issued

a global call for entrepreneurs to enter with innovative, high-growth startups.The competition will accelerate the development and success of high-growth,

high-impact new businesses, while stimulating job creation.Awards totaling up to $1 million will be allocated to the winning teams. Mass-

Challenge will continue to raise additional funds throughout the competition, and in mid-October, an expert panel will identify a dozen or more teams as winners. Any startup entrepreneur can enter the MassChallenge competition, with any new busi-ness, from anywhere in the world. The actual competition will conduct activities in Massachusetts where innovation resources are most concentrated. The MassChal-lenge team and up to 100 finalist teams will receive luxury office space on Boston’s

guideline that things that are discussed within the class should be considered confidential within the class. You would expect this from your classmates and you should do this as well. I will not, without permission of the student, discuss their idea in another class. If you don’t reveal this idea in this class, you might as well stop now because you will not get investors to support it. VCs will not and cannot sign DNDs until they go into the due diligence phase; if they need to sign a DND just to hear your idea, they will pass. VCs who receive a thousand business plans a year choose to skim and evaluate 100 out of the 1,000; they see a lot of ideas come year after year. It is almost universal that the student who is presenting the idea believes they thought it up themselves and that they are the first and only and that is very rarely the case.

Barry Horowitz is president of Horowitz & Company, LLC, a manage-ment consulting firm, and an adjunct professor at Boston University’s School of Management, where he teaches a certificate program for entrepreneurs. He has also been an entrepreneur and raised VC money. [email protected]

waterfront to maximize networking and mentorship opportunities during the in-tensive accelerator phase of the competi-tion, which runs July to October, 2010.

Applicants looking to enter the Mass-Challenge global startup competition should visit www.masschallenge.org as early as possible in order to maximize associated benefits. The deadline for entrant submission is June 11, 2010, and there are certain discounts available for early entry. Potential mentors, judges, sponsors and volunteers can also use the web site to register and receive more information.


our conferences, Michael Hennessy of the Coleman Foundation noted that in today’s complex and challenging environment, businesses need employees who are entrepreneurial. So while not all students who study entrepreneurship will start their own businesses, their careers as employees, and the businesses they work in, will thrive if they exhibit an entrepreneurial mindset.

In the community college setting, this is where the term “entrepreneurial president” or “culture of entrepreneur-ship” can be applied. The president, for instance, is not an entrepreneur as defined above, but within the structure of the bureaucratic college, they can act entrepreneurially, trying things that have never been done before. While they have not assumed personal financial risk, they can create something that didn’t exist previously.

the implicAtionsSo what are the implications of

delineating the definitions involved with entrepreneurship? For one thing, entrepreneurship can be embraced by the entire institution creating an empowering environment where recognizing and seiz-ing opportunities can help turn around fragile local economies.

“It will require greater cooperation among disciplines and departments,” says Sherry Tshibangu, assistant pro-fessor of Business and Economics at Monroe Community College (MCC) in Rochester, NY. “The dominant view on campus may be that an entrepreneur is a business student; however, innova-tion comes from various disciplines and a strong curriculum will need to draw from multiple resources—inside and outside—the college. We must develop relationships outside the college that will benefit students, for example, with lenders and the local community of en-trepreneurs, the self-employed and small business owners.

“Entrepreneurship Across the Cur-riculum (EAC) must be embraced by the leadership of the college,” adds Tshibangu. “To give students adequate support, it also requires workshop/semi-nar development of non-credit courses to complement current credit-bearing courses. At MCC, we have Auto Tech students and students in the Massage Therapy program who do not view them-selves as “entrepreneurs” even though many expressed an interest in working for themselves. Embracing EAC will be a great benefit to these students, the col-lege and the community.”

“The NACCE definitions challenge us as administrators and faculty to step away from the safety net of the tradi-tional teaching model and become more experiential in our teaching and con-tinued learning,” says Melissa Garcia, area program manager at Mid-Plains Community College in North Platte, NE. “Entrepreneurs evolve with changes in their environment, and to successfully encourage students to do so, we must practice what we preach—a forward-thinking mindset. For the curriculum, it allows us an opportunity to ingrain it across trades and into liberal arts as an essential 21st century skill.”

“Curriculum must also be created to be delivered via continuing education and into the workforce. The potential entrepreneurial strength of a commu-nity lies in the intellectual property that resides in the community,” says Tim Putnam, Director of the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center at North Iowa Area Community College, IA.

Regarding the curriculum implica-tions Les Ledger says, “The effort must be collaborative across the campus. No discipline can exist without creating something of value for the consumer, and private enterprise is the machine that delivers the product or service. Every discipline needs to see its part in creating value for the consumer in America and


Defining Entrepreneurship

more especially for the consumers of the world market. Disciplines need to show the student how that discipline will help the student gain a job, become an entre-preneur, and produce new, better goods or make the price cheaper.”

“We welcome members to share their views on these definitions and their implications,” says Van Sickle. “We’ve set up a blog on the NACCE Web site to continue this important discussion.”

References1 Russell S. Sobel, “Entrepreneur-

ship,” Concise Encyclopedia of Econom-ics, http://www.econlib.org/library/

Enc/Entrepreneurship.html. 2 Ibid, Sobel. 3 Peter Drucker, “Systematic Entre-

preneurship,” http://www.smarterhome-business.com/

entrepreneurship4 “Entrepreneurship in American

Higher Education, Kauffman Founda-tion, Kansas City, MO, 2008, p. 5.

5 Babson Web site: http://www3.babson.edu/Offices/ug_ccd/Entrepre-neurship.cfm.

6 William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2007 p. 3


to increase the numbers of newly trained business owners; increase the numbers of small business owners within the Hinds Community College District; increase workforce training; potential development of new cluster mentors; intergenerational exchange of business skills and an increase in leadership skills. The terminal outcomes would include

Serving Entrepreneurs on Florida’s Gold CoastbroWArD college stArts An entrepreneurship institute

By Norm Seavers Associate Vice President Broward College, Institute for Economic Development, Ft. Lauderdale, FL

The Kauffman Foundation recently listed Florida as having four of the five metropolitan areas nationally with the highest level of self-employment. Broward College is an urban community college with 60,000 students, three major campuses and eight centers located in the hotbed of this self-employment, the Fort Lauderdale-Broward County metro area.

Through the programs and services of its traditional credit and non-credit areas, Broward College has a history of supporting small businesses and entre-preneurs. Based on the present level of entrepreneurship and growth in this area, Broward College President David Arm-strong encouraged an expanded support of entrepreneurship and small business development.

The Business Administration de-partments at Broward College’s main campuses were brought together with department administrators from techni-cal education and continuing education to develop a plan. Two administrators were sent to the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship

conference in San Antonio in Janu-ary 2008. Information gathered at the NACCE conference was vital in moving forward with a plan to develop the Entre-preneurship Institute at Broward College.

360-degree missionThe mission of the Entrepreneurship

Institute at Broward College is grounded in the overall community college mission and takes a 360-degree approach to ad-dressing the needs of present and future entrepreneurs. We will:

▪ Articulate an entrepreneurship certificate to degree process for students moving from the Broward School System (K-12) to Broward College.

▪ Offer college certification in entre-preneurship to address the needs of Broward College graduates.

▪ Catalog resources in the metro area targeted to small businesses and entrepreneurs.

▪ Provide the requisite knowledge to start and maintain viable small busi-nesses in our community.


MyBiz Program

▪ Offer ongoing small business de-velopment workshops, courses, and related services open to the com-munity.

The Entrepreneurship Institute at Bro-ward College has a very strong advisory committee that will assist in driving the direction of the institute. Representation on the advisory committee includes en-trepreneurs/small business owners, area chambers of commerce, municipal and county economic development offices, incubators, small business development centers and Junior Achievement.

Future plans include the addition of an annual signature event, an operational incubator and related services to further support and foster continued entrepre-neurship in the Fort Lauderdale metro area.

increased economic development, in-creased entrepreneurialism, a decrease in brain drain and the establishment of new networks of small business development opportunities.

An additional spinoff outcome may be a reduction in the number of dislocated workers, having encouraged some of these individuals to create a small busi-

ness as a viable alternative to traditional employability options, which currently are seriously limited.

The MyBiz Phase III-SEP training program commenced February 2010 with an anticipated completion date of December 31, 2010.


Marketing on a ShoestringpArt one: brAnDing your entrepreneurship progrAm

By Melissa Crawford Director of the Scheinfeld Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation Santa Barbara City College, Santa Barbara, CA

Many entrepreneurship programs are in the infancy stage. A huge challenge with any new program is “getting the word out” both on-campus and off. Even if your program has been around a while, it might be a good time to re-think your marketing efforts, and be sure you are touching all the bases and making enough noise.

brAnd your progrAm using on-cAmpus resources

First, take a fresh look at all the services you offer or intend to offer. How are you attracting students to your courses and who are they? How do you get small businesses interested in and supportive of what you are doing? How do students find your courses in the

catalog and the schedule of classes? How can you best supplement the college-wide print materials? How will you get students and community members to at-tend your events? How will you get press coverage? What existing resources does your college offer in terms of marketing that you can tap into, for free?

When I joined the Scheinfeld Center last year, I embarked on a full-blown marketing campaign, with almost no money. When I asked to see our exist-ing logo, I was shown brown and yellow squares, and a pixilated world map. This “branding” wasn’t working for us, so I enlisted our in-house marketing depart-ment to come up with something a little more edgy and attractive. I wanted a real logo, with a real tagline–an identity that could be both edgy and current but that also lent itself to academic credibility and the seriousness of business. A tall order!

One of our first challenges was our very long name. After giving some con-sideration to shortening it, we decided to keep it and make it work. While the mar-keting department got busy on a logo, we brainstormed a tagline and settled on Dream. Plan. Profit. We felt this ac-curately promoted our mission to serve the entrepreneurs just starting out with an idea, to help students and small busi-nesses accelerate their ideas with careful planning, and to help students implement their plans to actually start a business. Our marketing department came back with a great logo, which allows some play with an ampersand. Fun!

brAnd with A self-mAnAged websiteMy next effort was to create a Web

site for the Scheinfeld Center, a place to advertise our courses, promote events, feature faculty and student businesses, house a blog, a video library and point visitors to resources.

An alumni Web designer contracted with us for $100 per page–what a great deal! I limited our site to 15 pages and this has been my most extravagant expenditure. I made sure that after it was designed, I could edit it easily. I wanted to be able to update our event calendar and courses often and without recurring costs. We purchased Adobe Contribute ($79), a user-friendly Web site editing software for dummies like me. This was a great investment. The program allows me to quickly update the Web site or change content anytime I need to. You see the final Web page design on the next page.

use cheAp do-it-yourself online print-ing resources

I have an artist friend who was mar-keting an event with a postcard. I was so impressed with the quality of the card and its appeal factor, I asked him for a referral to the vendor. I now regularly print 1,000 postcards for about $50 a pop (full-color gloss on the front, black and white on the back). They are excellent quality and weight, and the provider has an online design center that can turn an ordinary administrator into an extraordi-nary graphic designer! These cards get distributed all over campus and in the community. People love them.


be bold, tAke risk And use your imAgi-nAtion

Dare I say, “Have a little fun on your job?” The marketing aspect of this posi-tion taps into the right side of my brain that has sat dormant most of my profes-sional life. This is exciting and challeng-ing and pushes me to be creative. One risky marketing piece was a bookmark with our logo and text that simply read, “Dude, Where’s My Job?” and the reverse side contained our entrepreneur-ship course offerings. This has been our most popular marketing tool and students and faculty have been asking for us to make these into bumper stickers. I feel we are obliged to take risks, be bold and leading edge in delivering our services, especially since we teach entrepreneur-ship and innovation.

Recently, we are applying branding concepts to our entrepreneurship cur-riculum revisions and are creating more vibrant course titles that can be marketed to both a younger audience and the experienced business owner. Finding the balance between being edgy and current but maintaining academic credibility is the key to our branding.

Sherry Tshibangu, assistant professor of Business Administration /Economics at Monroe Community Col-lege (MCC), in Rochester, NY, has been recognized for her outstanding contributions to the college with a prestigious Excellence Award from the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development Award (NISOD). This award recognizes educators at institutions of higher education for their teaching and leader-ship excellence.

“Sherry Tshibangu has consistently and passionately gone beyond her job requirements to make the col-lege a better place in which to learn and to work,” said MCC President Anne Kress. “Most notably, in the classroom she has creatively connected students to the community through service learning projects. She successfully launched the Colleges Emerging Entrepreneurs Scholarship Program in July 2008 and served as the director until November 2009. In this role, she mentored several aspiring entrepreneurs.”

Tshibangu’s outstanding leadership helped to establish and launch “Pathways to Entrepreneurial Suc-cess,” a community resource forum hosted by the college in November 2009 with 400 participants attend-ing. She will be honored at the International Conference on Teaching and Leadership Excellence on May 30-June 2, 2010 in Austin, TX.

neWs note

Sherry Tshibangu Is 2010 NISOD Award Winner



Lessons Learned

companies that participate, even those that have not won funding, are much better off for having gone through the process and worked through a business plan.

Running a business plan competition is hard work. Some suggestions from the lessons we have learned follow:

▪ Engage a broad group to support the marketing and share the burdens of run-ning a competition. Running a statewide competition is a large undertaking. We have broken down the responsibilities among the JPECs and other supporting organizations. One JPEC has taken the marketing responsibilities and creates the brochures, issues the news releases, and develops and executes the marketing plan for the competition. One center serves as competition manager. This shifted after three years from the University of Iowa to NIACC last year, and NIACC is running the competition again this year. This includes responsibilities for calling the formative meetings, ensuring that materials are updated, rule changes are posted, the Web site is updated (the actual Web site changes are done by one of the other collaborators for the competition, IDED), but mostly this role involves responsibility for the collection of the business plan executive summaries, distribution of those to the judges and running the competition, including the final business plan review and judging. The leader of this effort puts the timeline together, calls the meetings and takes notes and disseminates them to the rest of the group.

▪ If possible use an online entry and review pro-cess. We now use Angelsoft, as the repository for executive summaries and business plans. This has allowed us to eliminate the need for creating DVDs of the plans, and also has sped up the process; the plans can be reviewed as they come into the sys-tem and judges are automatically advised of new entries.

▪ Market often and consistently. Getting businesses to compete may seem easy when the prize is part of $50,000, but that has not been the case. We have had to work our market areas hard, not just with marketing but actual contacts with potential contestants to encourage them to participate. We engage support from the Chambers of Commerce in our areas as well as the Economic Development Corporations in promoting and directing companies and entrepreneurs to our centers for information and encouragement to compete.

▪ Define Start-up. We have defined start-up com-panies differently over time. Generally mirroring statewide definitions for other funding, we started with companies three years old or younger, moved to six years and younger and are now back at four years and younger. We also define the value of the company as less than $3 million in net worth. And we do not allow retail or professional services. We do allow Internet-based retail or services, however.

▪ Require the business to be in your area or state. ▪ Have a statewide forum or conference at which you

can have the winners present and receive recogni-tion. But require the companies to be present to be

able to receive a check. No absentee recipients. No shows get no money.

▪ Bring back the winners to the con-ference to highlight their progress.

These are a few of the lessons learned and application of those lessons in devel-oping, launching and running a success-ful statewide business plan competition. You will find that this is hard work and takes planning from nearly the end of one competition to the delivery of the next competition. The effort we feel is worth it if it brings more clients through our doors working on their business plans and if it supports financially the development of home-grown businesses in the region and state.

For more information, contact Jamie Zanios at [email protected] or 641 422-4162.


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