Entrepreneurship Education in an Entrepreneurial Community

By

Shima Barakat Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning

Judge Business School University of Cambridge 24a Trumpington St.

Cambridge CB2 1QA UK

And

Thomas Hyclak Department of Economics

College of Business and Economics Lehigh University 621 Taylor St.

Bethlehem, PA 18017 USA tjh7@lehigh.edu

November, 2009

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Introduction

The past decade and a half has witnessed a sharp increase in academic studies and public policy initiatives focused on the regional and national economic impact of institutions of higher education. This interest parallels the development of the “knowledge economy” and the recognition that comparative advantage increasingly stems from the commercialization of scientific discoveries. From this perspective it is the role of universities in both knowledge creation and the translation of new knowledge into new products and processes that has attracted the attention of scholars and that has been the focus of government policies.

With the examples of MIT (Roberts and Eesley 2009) and Stanford (Lenoir et. al. 2004) in mind, one element of this new view of university impact focuses on the role of the university as an intermediary between science and its commercial application by new and existing businesses. Recent reviews by Rothaermal, Agung and Jiang (2007) and Siegel, Veugelers and Wright (2007) examine the growing literature on the effectiveness of universities in developing collaborative research partnerships with business firms, managing intellectual property, stimulating academic entrepreneurship, licensing new technology to existing and start­up companies, and creating innovation networks through science parks and incubators. Attempts to increase the efficiency of these technology transfer activities of higher education institutions have been the objective of several policy initiatives by the UK and the EU and its member nations (Tomes 2003).

Entrepreneurship education is a second element in the critical role that higher education institutions are seen as playing in the modern knowledge economy. Through education, universities can enhance the awareness of entrepreneurial opportunities among scientists and engineers and equip them with skills to enhance their ability to start a business based on their scientific work. Again following the lead of American institutions, universities in the UK and Europe have initiated programs of entrepreneurship education at an increasing pace since the turn of the century, partially in response to policy incentives (McKeown et. al. 2006 and Hannon 2007). Recent benchmarking surveys of entrepreneurship education programs in the UK (Botham and Mason 2007) and across Europe (NIRAS Consultants 2008) have attempted to identify common aspects and best practices of these educational initiatives. And Harding (2007) has tried to determine the impact of enterprise education on the new venture activities of university graduates. However, the relative youth of the educational initiatives under examination in these studies means that they can provide only a preliminary understanding of the impact of educational programs on the creation of a new science base for economy development.

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An interesting question concerns the interaction between these two elements of the Entrepreneurial University. For example, Nelson and Byers (2005) present a case study that examines the way in which informal interactions between technology transfer agents and entrepreneurship educators enhanced the effectiveness of each of these distinctly structured activities at Stanford. They place considerable emphasis on the entrepreneurial culture of the university as a determinant of synergies between technology transfer and entrepreneurship education.

This paper provides additional information on the role of entrepreneurship education in enhancing the transfer of technology from university to the economy by closely examining the program of entrepreneurship education that has emerged at the University of Cambridge. While at the center of an evolving cluster of high tech entrepreneurial firms over the last quarter century, it is only in the last five years that the University of Cambridge has initiated active programs in technology transfer and entrepreneurship education. We examine the way the somewhat unique educational offerings of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL), established in 2003, have been shaped by the culture of the University of Cambridge and by interaction with the entrepreneurial community formed by the Cambridge Cluster. We also examine the way these educational programs contribute to technology transfer within the Cambridge Cluster by linking the network of regional serial entrepreneurs/investors to scientists and engineers with new ideas.

Background

A strong public policy interest in enhancing the economic development role of institutions of higher education has not been limited to the UK but indeed has swept across Europe. Although there has been a rapid development of entrepreneurship education programs across European universities the individual institutional responses have been varied. A large number of entrepreneurship education courses, modules and degree programs have been introduced in European Universities since 2000 and these programs exhibit significant variation in response to local conditions and differences in learning objectives across institutions. However, it is possible to use the results of a recent comprehensive survey of almost 200 entrepreneurship education programs at over 600 institutions in 29 countries carried out for the European Union (NIRAS Consultants 2008) to sketch the general outlines of the “typical” characteristics of these new educational ventures. The general assessment seems to be that European institutions have sought to emulate their American counterparts in designing courses of study related to entrepreneurship. Some highlights from the EU survey are:

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• About 51% of the institutions reported no programs or indicated that entrepreneurship was covered in a limited fashion within courses.

• Only a minority of institutions (48%) had courses where entrepreneurship accounted for 25% or more of the course content.

• On average, only 12% of undergraduate students, 15% of graduate students and 12% of doctoral students enrolled in entrepreneurship classes.

• Entrepreneurship courses appear to be concentrated on undergraduate students in independent business schools and institutions with business studies units while entrepreneurship degree programs are primarily oriented to master’s students in business. However, most schools have cross­disciplinary course structures that allow students from across the university to take entrepreneurship courses.

• Lectures are the most frequently used teaching method, supplemented by case studies, guest lecturers and team projects. About a third frequently used people with entrepreneurial experience as instructors.

• In addition to courses, about three fourths of the institutions have extra­curricular seminars and about half hold business plan competitions

• On average there were 1.8 tenured faculty members and 1.4 non­tenured faculty members in entrepreneurship at institutions with courses and degree programs. Less than a third of staff members had entrepreneurial experience.

• In 40% of the schools, the fact that entrepreneurship education relied heavily on the active interest of one or a few staff members was seen as the most important limiting factor to the development of these educational programs.

The entrepreneurship education programs that has emerged at the University of Cambridge, has bloomed embedded within specific elements of academic, local, national contexts, somewhat in contrast to the European scenario illustrated above. Specifically:

1. A high rate of academic invention and entrepreneurship at the University contributed to the growth of the entrepreneurial community (‘the Cambridge Cluster’) that has transformed Cambridge from a small university town to perhaps the most significant center of high tech start­up businesses in Europe. And in turn the cluster contributes to the entrepreneurship activities at the university.

2. The development of UK public policy initiatives designed to enhance technology transfer and enterprise education in British higher education institutions has been particularly beneficial for Cambridge University as it strove to capitalize on the new structures and resources made available.

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The Cambridge Cluster

The evolution of a significant cluster of networked high tech firms in the Cambridge region has been well­documented in two monographs (Segal Quince & Partners 1985 and Segal Quince Wicksteed 2000) and a large number of academic books and papers. Several features of this phenomenon are worthy of highlighting as they form a critical context for the consideration of entrepreneurship education programs at the University of Cambridge.

Starting from a minuscule base, the number of entrepreneurial high tech firms more than doubled every decade from 1970 to 2000. While the pace of growth slackened after 2000, in part due to the dot com/telecom bust, the cluster continued to expand until by 2007 around 1400 high tech firms accounted for 15% of total employment within a 25 mile radius of Cambridge, an area that ranked first in Europe in startup investment per capita and is widely regarded as the continent’s most significant innovation region (Cambridge Technopole Report 2008).

As indicated in Table 1, by 2007 the Cambridge Cluster included a diverse structure of high tech industries and a rich local network of firms providing technical support, finance and business support to high tech entrepreneurs. While the power of MIT in producing high tech entrepreneurship is unparalleled, it is worthwhile noting that the large number of biotech startups in the Greater Cambridge region 1 compares quite favorably with the 95 biotech companies located next to MIT in the Kendall Square area (Roberst and Eesley 2009). What is not readily apparent from the data in Table 1 is the extent to which the evolution of the Cambridge Cluster created significant social capital, in the form of collective organizations like the Cambridge Network and other formal and informal social and knowledge networks of serial entrepreneurs and support professionals, that facilitates the continued development of high tech enterprise in the region (Garnsey and Heffernan 2005).

Of considerable interest is the fact that the Cambridge Cluster evolved in what we might call a laissez­faire environment. Unlike the case of Stanford and Silicon Valley, where large defense contracts supported the development of the research capacity of the university and the initial growth of high tech companies like Hewlett­ Packard, the scale of UK government support for research was much smaller and there was very little support in Cambridge from government or regional development agencies for university­industry research collaboration, technology transfer, or new business start­ups until the late 1990s.

1 For a map illustrating the location of biotech firms and organizations in and near Cambridge in 2007 see http://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/docs/Biotech_Map.pdf

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In addition, the University of Cambridge played a limited direct role in the development of the high tech cluster. University leaders influenced local government officials to be more open to science­based industrial development in the late 1960s. And Trinity College, opening the Cambridge Science Park in 1970, and St. Johns College, investing in the St. Johns Innovation Center in 1987, helped develop a real estate infrastructure responsive to the needs of start­up companies. But the University had limited interest in technology transfer, writing its first intellectual property policy only in 1987, and provided limited resources to assist academic entrepreneurs. The limited direct role of the University in promoting the development of the cluster leads Armbruster (2008) to characterize Cambridge as a successful “discovery” university rather than as an “entrepreneurial” university.

Academic Entrepreneurship at the University

On the other hand, the policies and culture of the University played a critical permissive or indirect role by limiting barriers to the commercial initiatives of faculty and staff. A liberal policy of assigning intellectual property rights to academic inventors and allowing faculty to engage freely in commercial activities as long as they met their academic responsibilities helped establish a culture of entrepreneurship among individuals on the academic and research staff (Garnsey and Heffernan 2005). As evidence of this culture of entrepreneurship, Table 2 provides estimates by Peter Hiscocks (2005) of the number of new business ventures started on the basis of intellectual property owned by the University or new knowledge created by the faculty, staff and students of the University. While these ventures were not all located in or near Cambridge, an analysis of these data by the consultancy firm Library House (2006) indicates that as of 2005 new ventures from the University accounted for 12% of the high tech firms located in the region and 20% of new companies starting up in the period from 2000­2005.

Counting the number of new businesses reliant on intellectual property or scientific knowledge stemming from research at the University understates the importance of academic entrepreneurs in shaping the development of the Cambridge cluster. The detailed study by Myint, Vyakarnam and New (2005) identifies the prominent role played by serial entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists associated with the University in the evolution the Cambridge Cluster. This role extends well beyond the initial start­ups that could be linked directly to intellectual property or research results generated at the University; in many cases the initial new venture spawned one or more new generations of start­up firms. This “flexible recycling” (Bahrami and Evans 2000) of individuals and resources links a large number of the high tech entrepreneurial firms in the Cambridge area in a family tree with its base in early start­ups by key individuals who were or still are associated with the University. Figure 1 illustrates the family tree for businesses stemming from Acorn Computing.

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What accounts for the fairly large number of enterprising academics at a University with a decidedly passive approach to the commercialization of university research outcomes? Interviews with several faculty entrepreneurs 2 reiterate the point made earlier that this passive approach led to policies that allowed individuals the freedom to pursue commercial applications of their research if they were so inclined. More than one interviewee described the University policy as “we don’t pay you a high salary so we cannot restrict your opportunities to earn outside income”. Another factor cited by most interviewees was the close connection between applied and basic research questions and methods in the new fields of information technology and bio technology and, more generally, in engineering disciplines. This made it easier for university researchers in these fields to see opportunities through interaction with industry researchers, many of whom increasingly worked in embedded laboratories on the Cambridge campus. Finally, interviewees often pointed to the example of senior faculty members in labs and departments whose own activities helped create a culture conducive to individual enterprise within their units. To these points we might add the evidence that “star scientists” are more likely to engage in and succeed in starting businesses to exploit their research discoveries ( Audretsch et. al. 2006 and Zucker and Darby 2007)

Government Policy

The passive approach to commercialization activities at the University of Cambridge did not last beyond the turn of the 21 st century. In response to policy initiatives of the UK Government 3 and the growing complexity of intellectual property management, the University established an enhanced technology transfer unit, a new intellectual property policy, funds to support student entrepreneurship and major applied research efforts, and a new entrepreneurship education program within a short span of a few years.

In 1998­99 the University of Cambridge competed successfully for funding from the £45 million University Challenge Fund to establish a pool of money to invest in new ventures and part of a national £25 million Science Enterprise Challenge Fund to set up the Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre. This Centre, a part of the Judge Business School, assumed responsibilities for both technology transfer programs and enterprise education. In addition, the University was the recipient of £60 million from the government to establish the Cambridge – MIT Institute, housed in the Institute for

2 During the Easter Term 2008, Thomas Hyclak interviewed 10 faculty members at the University of Cambridge who were actively engaged in commercialization of their research through start‐ups, licensing or consulting along with several research and technology transfer managers at Cambridge and Oxford. 3 For detailed discussions on the evolution of UK enterprise policies see Tomes (2003), McKeown et. al. (2006) and Hannon (2007).

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Manufacturing, to support joint research and educational programs with commercial potential.

And yet UK policy has not had the same impact across the UK. Botham and Mason (2007) provide an interesting examination of the status of entrepreneurship education in the UK through assessing website material. They conclude that most programs seem very young if not still in the planning stage; existing activities are more “about” than “for” entrepreneurship; many schools have rebranded business courses as “enterprise” studies; most activities are at a small scale with small numbers of students; and much of the education is delivered by part­time staff or non­academics from the technology transfer office. In general, resource limitations are the key factor in the limited development of these programs.

Entrepreneurship Education at Cambridge

In 2003 the University separated the activities of the Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre by establishing Cambridge Enterprise to manage technology transfer activities and the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning to provide entrepreneurship education programs. In 2005 a new intellectual property policy was adopted and in 2007 Cambridge Enterprise Ltd. was set up as a wholly owned subsidiary of the University. Thus in about a 10 year period, the University of Cambridge changed its organizational structure in significant ways to switch from a passive supporter of commercialization activities by individual researchers to an active manager of intellectual property, academic entrepreneurship, licensing and consulting, and entrepreneurship education.

At the very early stages of the development of courses at Cambridge, CfEL simply delivered courses that looked like business development modules. But through these and the research programme of finding out how disruptive technology companies have emerged from the research base of the University, it became clear quite early on that three core values were needed for a programme of education to be established:

That practitioners would carry the credibility and the tacit knowledge required to be effective in what was taught and in the delivery.

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That content would need to be sensitive to the context. In the case of students this included such observations that they were more interested in personal development, gaining an overview about entrepreneurship and were located in tightly defined disciplines – such as physics, engineering, chemistry etc., Therefore content had to be carefully designed on a course by course basis with learning outcomes in mind.

The context of learning at Cambridge included those with no interest per se in entrepreneurship, through to nascent entrepreneurs and that too drawn from a range of science, engineering, technology and maths.

In addition to holding these values in the design criteria, it became increasingly clear that the teaching needed to diversify from “Business only” content to include personal development and social/entrepreneurial skills. This meant that the courses had to somehow be designed to try and include as much of these learning outcomes as was possible.

The descriptions that follow attempt to capture additional detail of the courses that have been designed with these principles in mind.

Credit­bearing Modules and Programs

The main response to the call for enhanced enterprise education via credit­ bearing modules at the undergraduate level thus has come from individual programs. The engineering department has added to its curriculum modules on “taking technology to market” and “enterprise and business development”, along with other business­ related modules, mainly taught by faculty in the Institute for Manufacturing. And the departments of chemical engineering, material science and physics offer an elective module on “emerging technology enterprise” taught by staff of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning. These electives appear to be the only entrepreneurship­ related courses available as part of degree programs for first, second or third year students at the University.

The main university­wide effort to expand enterprise education was the development of a suite of six M. Phil. programs by the Cambridge­MIT Institute. These graduate degrees were patterned after successful programs at MIT and had a professional practice orientation achieved by combining a shared business management core with a specific science or engineering field. Programs in Technology Policy, Engineering for Sustainable Development and Bioscience Enterprise came on

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line in 2003 and those in Advanced Chemical Engineering Practice, Computational Biology and Micro and Nanotechnology Enterprise started in 2004 The business core includes modules focused on business management, innovation and technology management and entrepreneurship.

Oliver and Runde (no date) document the difficulties related to differences in campus cultures of transplanting this type of course from MIT to Cambridge. They also indicate the extent to which these programs have met their financial and enrollment objectives in the short period since their inception. Recent study in engineering (Shawcross 2009) has focused on the curriculum needs to develop the general business and leadership skills and the opportunity recognition and business development competencies to enhance the entrepreneurial outcomes from graduate education in engineering at the University of Cambridge.

CfEL Programs

Since taking on the educational mission associated with the Science Enterprise Challenge in 2003, the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL) has developed a unique portfolio of programs designed to inspire and enable entrepreneurship among science and engineering students. These programs are primarily extra­curricular in nature and not limited to students at the University of Cambridge. CfEL itself has acted in an entrepreneurial manner in developing market niches, marshalling resources needed to meet market demand and organizing to manage and market its educational programs as business products. And CfEL has become one of the key social enterprises in the network of start­up firms and support organizations that make up the Cambridge Cluster.

CfEL has developed three key extra­curricular programs:

• Enterprise Tuesday is a series of free weekly lectures during the Michaelmas and Lent terms with the objective of inspiring individuals to consider entrepreneurship as a career option and of providing them with information useful for acting on that inspiration. The program, which completed its ninth year in 2008/2009, follows the CfEL approach of using entrepreneurs and others from the business community to deliver lectures on themes that have been carefully crafted by CfEL staff. While the lectures are not assessed for degree purposes, enrollment is required, attendance is recorded and attendees can earn a Certificate in Enterprise upon submission of a portfolio of work related to the lectures.

Enterprise Tuesday, the business plan competitions run by the student­led Cambridge University Entrepreneurs and the annual technology ventures conference organized by the Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise

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Club are the most prominent entrepreneurship education activities at the University of Cambridge.

• Enterprisers is a four­day experiential learning exercise designed to develop entrepreneurial self­efficacy, stimulate creativity and the identification of enterprising projects and to build leadership, team and organizational skills. Originally focused on undergraduates, this program has changed its emphasis to PhD students who come from many universities. The program has been offered at several UK locations in addition to Cambridge. In 2007 CfEL started licensing the program, which is offered in Australia, Germany and Malaysia. More recently, a version of this program called Intraprisers has been successfully marketing as a creativity training program for the staff of large enterprises like Microsoft.

• Ignite is a week­long summer program for individuals who have ideas for new ventures. After a week of workshops, skill­building activities, mentor sessions and networking opportunities with people active in the Cambridge Cluster the participants develop a business plan presentation for a panel of investors, entrepreneurs and venture heads. Follow on opportunities for alumni are designed to establish and maintain networks developed during the program.

In addition to these extra­curricular programs, CfEL staff teach an elective module called Emerging Technologies Entrepreneurship to MBA students and undergraduate and graduate students in chemical engineering, material science and physics. This is a proof of concept course, in which students attempt to evaluate the commercial potential of research discoveries in science and engineering by faculty and students at the University of Cambridge. And an initiative that will be launched in October 2009 links the three programs and for­credit module of CfEL into an Advanced Diploma in Entrepreneurship offered by the University’s Institute of Continuing Education.

There are several unique aspects to this portfolio of entrepreneurship education programs that serve to illustrate the entrepreneurial approach taken by CfEL in developing and managing its offerings:

• The courses and lectures are open to students from other universities and to working individuals not currently enrolled in an institution of higher education and many of those attending do not reside in the Cambridge area. For example, during 2007/2008 attendance at Enterprise Tuesday lectures averaged just over 270 people. Typically, 29% were from the local business community and 8%

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were students and staff at other institutions of higher education. And of those attending the summer 2009 session of Ignite, 11were associated with the University of Cambridge, 8 were from other Universities and 33 were employed by a wide range of organizations in several countries. While keeping to its focus on supporting science entrepreneurship, CfEL takes a wide view of the potential market for its programs and of the general population it seeks to serve. This has allowed CfEL to achieve a degree of scale efficiency even though its products are fully elective and generally carry no academic credit for Cambridge students.

• Much of the actual instruction is delivered by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and other people from the business community. This greatly expands the resources available to those attending CfEL programs since they generally engage with a number of people with practical experience in the issues related to technology ventures. Over 200 such experts are part of the “teaching staff” drawn on by CfEL. Since these instructors are willing to work without direct compensation, CfEL is able to enhance dramatically the quality and scope of its offerings while staying within its budget. It appears that the quid pro quo for the teaching staff is the opportunity for enhanced contact with scientists and engineers who may have new business ideas of potential significance. In this way the programs of CfEL serve as an important link between the network of individuals and organizations in the Cambridge Cluster and those developing new knowledge within the University of Cambridge, other institutions of higher learning and other organizations.

• For entrepreneur­led instruction to be successful, the courses and modules must be organized carefully and linked together to form a coherent program. Even the case studies offered by successful serial entrepreneurs run the risk of degenerating into “war stories” if they are not offered in an appropriate context. To do this CfEL has a unique structure for an academic unit with teaching responsibility. Rather than being organized around academics and their areas of specialization, the CfEL staff is organized around the educational products it offers. Each program has, in effect, a product manager who works with the Director to develop the curricular objectives for each module, communicates these objectives in a detailed fashion to those engaged to deliver the modules and programs, and works with other staff to market the product and manage the logistics required for its delivery. Each product manager is also actively engaged in evaluating each program through interaction with the students and instructors.

Looked at in this fashion we can see the CfEL as a social enterprise identifying market niches to which it can supply value­added educational programs, marketing its

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programs to a wide audience to insure an appropriate scale of activity thereby enhancing the opportunities presented to Cambridge students, obtaining resources from the highly entrepreneurial community in and around Cambridge to provide high quality programs at a reasonable cost and organizing in a business­like manner to develop and deliver these programs. By linking the entrepreneurial community directly to entrepreneurship education programs, CfEL helps meet the objective of enhancing knowledge transfer from universities by educating scientists and engineers about entrepreneurship opportunities.

Impact

While the programs briefly described above are quite new, it is possible to look at some preliminary data on their impact. As indicated by Hannan, Leitch and Hazlett (2006), an evaluation of the impact of entrepreneurial education programs needs to go beyond counts of new ventures started by graduates to consider the effect of the programs on student attitudes toward entrepreneurship and their beliefs in their own ability to pursue an entrepreneurial career. Individual attitudes and assessments of their self­efficacy in a particular pursuit have been found to be strong predictors of behavior (Bandura and Wood 1989). Here we look at data on student participation, attitudes and entrepreneurial actions as a preliminary study of the impact of new educational programs pursued by CfEL and other units of the University of Cambridge since 2000.

Since the purpose of the Enterprise Tuesday lectures is to inform students about entrepreneurship in order to inspire science and engineering students in particular to consider entrepreneurial careers, it might best be evaluated by the number of attendees and the range of academic fields represented by the audiences. In eight years registration for these lectures increased seven fold from around 200 in 2000/2001 to over 1400 in 2007/2008. Attendance figures have trended upward in a similar fashion. The students come from all of the Colleges at the University and a significant number from departments like engineering, biotechnology, chemical engineering, physics and computer science participate in the lectures. With the number of attendees often hitting 300 or more, this lecture series has become the most popular non­assessed course at Cambridge.

The Enterprisers program focuses on building confidence and skills relevant for starting a business. Since the attendees are generally science and engineering graduate students who enroll in this weekend programs from many different Universities, it seems safe to assume that they have developed an interest in becoming an entrepreneur before attending the program. A pre­ and post­course survey of 55 students suggests that the program had a positive effect on their self­efficacy (Vyakarnam 2005). In particular, statistically significant increases (p < .001) as a result of the course were found for the percent of students who believed that they had: the

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ability to motivate others (74% v. 59%); the ability to lead a diverse group (63% v. 37%); the understanding of what it takes to start a venture (77% v. 19%), and the skills to start a company if they wished to do so (59% v. 22%).

A more detailed examination of surveys of attendees at Enterprisers is presented by Cooper and Lucas (2006), who conclude that the program has had “consequential and enduring impacts upon participant self­confidence” (p.153). Of particular interest are their results comparing pre­program responses to responses registered six months after the program ended for around 160 attendees. Like those reported above, these results indicate statistically significant increases in the percent of respondents expressing a good to excellent self­rating of their entrepreneurial skills, such as recognizing an opportunity (87% v. 68%); understanding what it takes to start a new business (75.8% v. 41.6%); and being able to start a successful business (67.3% v. 43.8%). Cooper and Lucas (2006) do not find much evidence of an increase in entrepreneurial intent in their comparison of pre­program and half­year post­program responses. However, the percent that agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “at least once I will have to take a chance and start my own company” increased from 75.3% pre­program to 82.9% six months after the program, which is statistically significant at the .002 level.

Both of these examinations of student responses provide support for the conclusion that the Enterprisers program in fact is meeting its main objective of enhancing entrepreneurial confidence and self­efficacy.

The Ignite program is designed to help participants develop a nascent business idea into a full business plan while developing a network of contacts that could prove useful to a fledgling business. The impact of this program would seem then to be judged by the number of participants who subsequently started a venture. A survey sent to the 205 attendees of this program from 1999 to 2005 generated responses from 115 individuals. Of these respondents, 55 (48%) reported that they were or had been involved with a new venture since their participation in Ignite. Three of the new ventures started by program graduates had been able to raise venture finance of roughly £10 million each while the typical start­up was self­financed. About a dozen respondents who had not yet started a business indicated that they were still evaluating a possible start­up. This appears to be a relatively high rate of entrepreneurship; in comparison the Global Economic Monitor surveys suggest that 15­20% of highly educated people in high income countries are entrepreneurs (Autio 2007). While it is difficult to determine how much of this start­up activity can be attributed to the educational program since all of its participants to begin with came to the program with a new business idea in mind, the large number of participants who indeed followed through with plans to implement their business ideas is suggestive of the value of the program.

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The case of Alphamosaic illustrates the way in which Ignite intersects with the Cambridge Cluster. This is also a case where the principal attributed part of his success to the program itself. Stephen Barlow attended the program in 2000 while he was employed by Cambridge Consultants, an engineering consulting firm whose research has spawned a number of start­ups in Cambridge. His business idea involved a video chip design that he developed into a business plan at Ignite and then launched with £10 million from a consortium of three venture capital funds (two located in the greater Cambridge area) in April 2001. Alphamosaic was subsequently sold to Broadcom for $123 million in 2004. This is an illustration of the way this educational program can help individuals get their ideas ready for market and link people in one part of the Cambridge network with others who can support the creation of the new venture.

The MBA and undergraduate modules on Emerging Technology Entrepreneurship is designed to bring together students with on­campus inventors to evaluate the market potential of new technology and prepare a commercial feasibility report. These modules have been offered in its current form since 2004. The graduate level has engaged over 100 MBA students and, in 2008 and 2009, 10 doctoral students in about 35 student projects evaluating the commercial potential of new technology. The undergraduate version has enrolled over 285 chemical engineering, material science and physics students, who have carried out 65 projects. These evaluation studies provided 50 researchers with an understanding of the commercial potential and start­up feasibility of their inventions while giving students the opportunity to learn while conducting commercial research on real technologies.

Finally, a recent survey of a small number of alumni from the University of Cambridge collected data that is useful in evaluating university entrepreneurship education programs in general. Key results are presented in Table 3. Information was obtained from 123 alumni who graduated sometime after 2000 and 80 alumni who graduated earlier than 2000. Of these, 39 and 41, respectively, identified themselves as having been involved in an entrepreneurial venture after graduation. The main results in the table present average scores on a five point Likert scale indicating agreement with statements about entrepreneurial education at the University. There are three key findings:

1. Entrepreneurs from both cohorts were more like to agree with the statements that their experiences at Cambridge increased their understanding and interest in entrepreneurship but non­entrepreneurs from the post 2000 group were more likely to agree than entrepreneurs from the pre­2000 cohort.

2. More recent graduates who were involved in a start­up had fairly high agreement that their experiences at Cambridge had enhanced their entrepreneurial skills

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along the four dimensions listed in the Table. By contrast, entrepreneurs in the pre­2000 cohort, on average, seemed to disagree with this statement.

3. Among non­entrepreneurs both cohorts had similar agreement with the statement that “the idea of starting a company appeals to me”. However, there is a distinct contrast between the groups in their assessment of the preparation provided by programs at the University.

While this data is derived from a very small sample it does provide an indication that the move to more active entrepreneurship education programs at the University of Cambridge after 2000 has had a positive effect on attitudes toward entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills.

Conclusion

The main elements of European entrepreneurship education programs described earlier are also found at the University of Cambridge. However, the mix of offerings is tilted more in the direction of graduate courses and extracurricular educational programs than seems to be the case at the typical European university. This may be attributed to the collegiate structure of the University of Cambridge, in which programs of study are supported by university­wide lectures and labs and college­specific supervisions. This structure makes it difficult to add new undergraduate programs of study and the resulting decentralized administration means that educational initiatives rest mainly with academic units.

Despite its prominent role in the evolution of the Cambridge Cluster, the University of Cambridge has only recently developed active technology transfer and entrepreneurship education programs. The impetus for doing so came largely from government attempts to enhance the economic impact of the university research programs it funds. The University was one of the winners of the Science Enterprise Challenge and received a large infusion of funds through the creation of the Cambridge­ MIT Institute. With these new resources the University consolidated and expanded its IP management, licensing, start­up and consultancy activities, eventually forming Cambridge Enterprise in 2003 and establishing it as an independent subsidiary in 2007.

Government enterprise policy was not just focused on technology transfer from universities but also envisioned an important role for entrepreneurship education, particularly of science and engineering students, in expanding the rate of commercial exploitation of new discoveries. The decentralized, collegiate structure of the University of Cambridge makes it difficult to establish new undergraduate programs so the approach to entrepreneurship education there differs from that taken in most European

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Universities. Instead of undergraduate and business­oriented degree programs, formal course work at Cambridge comes in modules within existing undergraduate science and engineering programs and at the graduate level. In addition to formal course work, much of the enterprise education at the University is in the form of extra­curricular programs offered by the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL), which was also established in 2003. In its short existence, CfEL has developed a set of programs and an organization that has several unique features:

• The main programs are focused on niche educational products marketed to science and engineering students with different levels of entrepreneurial understanding and interest. In order to reach the appropriate scale to offer quality programs, CfEL markets these products to students at other universities and to individuals in the community in addition to staff and students at the University of Cambridge. CfEL has used the decentralized structure and entrepreneurial environment at the University of Cambridge to develop successful educational programs in a nontraditional manner.

• The key resource available to CfEL in developing and marketing high quality entrepreneurship education programs is the dense network of entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, angels, venture capitalists and business and technology start­up specialists that has developed in the Cambridge area over the last three decades. These individuals deliver the educational programs of CfEL, providing credibility and experiential depth, on a pro bono basis. In return these individuals enhance their links to the University and gain exposure to new cohorts of science and engineering students and to their research ideas.

• Instead of a typical academic organization, CfEL has a product organization with individual staff members responsible for marketing, coordinating and managing the delivery of each educational program. A critical feature of this product line focus is the ability to clearly specify the expected role and activities of the guest lecturers in a way that helps achieve learning objectives while avoiding an incoherent “war story” approach to entrepreneurship education. Regular and varied efforts to get feedback from attendees help CfEL in managing the “staff” of guest lecturers and addressing evident weak points in the programs themselves.

These unique features lead us to conclude that CfEL has taken a highly entrepreneurial approach to entrepreneurship education. Some preliminary, and admittedly sketchy, data suggest that the main programs offered by CfEL have had some success in meeting their objectives. CfEL’s educational products have developed

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to the point where heretofore separate programs have been combined into an advanced degree option offered through the University’s continuing education office.

A final point to emphasize is the way CfEL has connected the University to the Cambridge Cluster via entrepreneurship education as a complement to technology transfer activities. This has come by opening up programs to interested individuals not enrolled or employed by the University and connecting these nascent entrepreneurs to the Cambridge Cluster network in the classroom and lecture hall. Certainly the CfEL approach took advantage of the existing entrepreneurial community in Cambridge and thus is probably not readily applicable in any other university­community setting. Within the Cambridge Cluster, however, it is an interesting case study of the way an entrepreneurial community has incorporated entrepreneurship education in its evolving network of organizations and institutions.

References

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Cooper, Sarah Y., and William A Lucas, “Developing Self­Efficacy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship: An Educational Approach,” International Journal of Entrepreneurship Education, 4 2006, 141­162.

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Table 1

Structure of the Cambridge Cluster in 2007

Type of Firm Number 1. Products/Processes based on new science 730

Biotech 208 Software 138 Instruments 124 IT Electronics 89

2. Technical consulting, research institutes, etc. 190 3. Business support firms 610

Source: www.cambridgeinvestmentresearch.com/uploads/GCP_CIR_HiTechReportUpdates2007.pdf

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Table 2

Spinouts and Startups from the University of Cambridge

Department 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000­05 Biotech & Biochemistry

0 0 1 10 24

Computer Lab

0 0 7 32 30

Engineering 0 3 5 16 24

Other 3 0 5 49 49

Total 3 3 18 107

Source: Hiscocks (2005).

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Table 3

Graduate Assessment of Entrepreneurship Education at University of Cambridge

Graduated after 2000 Graduated before 2000 Entrepreneurs Others Entrepreneurs Others

Number 39 84 41 39 Average Age 29.8 29.9 52.6 50.7 % Female 13 45 24 26

Attitudes* Understanding 4.00 3.52 2.71 2.12 Interest 4.04 3.10 3.40 2.24

Entrepreneurial Skills** Market Recognition 3.71 2.71 Team Building 3.79 2.62 Pitching Ideas 4.07 2.71 Legal Issues 3.71 2.71

Enterprise Interest*** Appeal of a startup 3.79 3.64 Preparation 3.51 2.58

*Average agreement with the statement that “my experiences at UC increased my understanding and interest in entrepreneurship” 5 point Likert scale where 5 = strongly agree. **Average agreement with statement that entrepreneurship programs attended at UC helped develop my skills. 5 point Likert Scale where 5 = strongly agree. ***Average agreement with statements “starting a company appeals to me” and “entrepreneurship programs attended at UC would be a good preparation for starting my own business”. 5 point Likert scale where 5 = strongly agree.

Source: Jan­Georg Streletzki, “The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education in Cambridge,” Presentation at the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, August 2008.

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Figure 1: Venture Participation by Individuals Involved with Acorn Computing

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Source: Myint, Y.M. and Vyakarnam, S. (2004) "Multiple directorships in Cambridge hi­tech cluster: implications for policy and research." (The 27th Institute of Small Business Affairs National Conference). Available at: http://www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/research/downloads/multiple.pdf.