Students and Social Entrepreneurship

I’m just back from attending the annual Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Center’s Annual Meeting which this year was held at Penn State University. One of the things that I really like about the conference is the conversation that you can have with other directors over coffee. This year, the topic of social entrepreneurship was hotter than ever, which I think is thanks to the “primary customer” that we deal with. Our “primary customer” is the student, and this generation of students wants to do more with their lives than just get a job. They want to make meaning in their lives, and they are starting while they are in college. More students than ever want to start or work for non-profits, more students are creating business plans for non-profits, and many want to start for profit businesses that will spin off money that they can then donate to non-profits. For all of the things that are said in the media about this generation, this is one thing that those articles seem to miss…that this group of students wants to do more than just get a job and make tons of money, they really want to try to make the world a better place. As a result, many of the colleges and universities that I spoke to at GCEC are retooling some of their courses to help these students make meaning, and understand the landscape facing social entrepreneurs today. Stay tuned, there is definitely more coming in the months ahead on this phenomenon.

Students Catching the Entrepreneurship Fever

Great story in Business Week on student entrepreneurship, under the article, Startup Fever written by Max Raskin. Now, of course I wish they had included our program, as we are one of the top programs in the country...ranked number seven by Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine, was number six last year in US News…and through our Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship, we have a fantastic program in the Couri Hatchery helping students who want to start their own business.

From Dream to Launch

Very interesting piece by Tim Beyers in Entrepreneur magazine that I ran across through Alltop, titled How to Make Your Business Dream a Reality.

Work with a bias toward action.No doubt accountability is a key feature of the action-oriented startup, but perhaps the most important attribute is a propensity to act. For that to occur, Belsky says entrepreneurs need to unlearn some things."It's important, in the early stages of a creative project, to almost do the opposite of what we're taught growing up, which is to think before we act," Belsky says. "Startups have to recognize that their competitive advantage against the big guys is that they have the space to [experiment]."What they don't have is time. Today's startups build and release products in days rather than months. In that environment, action is a survival skill, Belsky says, especially if the original concept was right all along.Evan Saks, founder of build-to-order mattress maker Create-A-Mattress.com in Needham, Mass., learned this lesson the hard way. He says his team spent two months talking with suppliers about adding options before his design agency pushed him to focus on getting the company's website live. Feedback would dictate changes, the agency's owner said. It was just the wake-up call Saks needed."Following that meeting, I created a roadmap that let the other vendors see there was a place for them in the future. Then, I set the roadmap aside and put all energies into launching the core website the way it was originally conceived," Saks says.

Innovation and the Miners

If you’re like me, you were following the story of the miners in Chile. Watching their incredible rescue was wonderfully exhilarating as it was a story of faith, perseverance, leadership, determination, and many other things, including innovation. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger writes a column on how Capitalism Saved the Miners. While the article was interesting, what I felt was particularly noteworthy was how some companies jumped in to help out. From the article:

Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.
Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.
A remarkable Sept. 30 story (Innovations Ease the Plight of Trapped Miners) about all this by the Journal's Matt Moffett was a compendium of astonishing things that showed up in the Atacama Desert from the distant corners of capitalism.

Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc, Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.

Chile's health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, "I never realized that kind of thing actually existed."

Ideas and Innovation

Yesterday while hanging around the airport waiting for my flight to be ready to leave, I ran across in Wired magazine the short but interesting article on ideas and innovation, Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From. I liked several things in the piece… the notion that ideas are like networks…that to create good stuff you have to create a lot of bad stuff first…and that ideas come through collaboration and standing on the shoulders of other ideas before you. A quick but very interesting read.

Using Geolocation Services to Drive Your Business

Last night I was speaking to the Syracuse University Alumni Club of New York City, and afterwards, one of our alum’s came up asked me a question about technology and the entrepreneur. He asked how an entrepreneur knows the difference between “real” technology that can truly advance the startup business, and the “pretenders.” I thought it was a particularly interesting question because as entrepreneurs we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can grow our businesses, and unless we happen to be techy’s, we don’t have the time to really consider and examine all the new stuff that’s coming out. But I did refer him to a good story in yesterday’s NY Times by Kermit Pattison, Geolocation Services: Find a Smart Phone; Find a Customer, that showed how real entrepreneurs are using geolocation services such as Four Square, which was started by SU’s own Dennis Crawley. Read the article and then imagine how you might be able to use these services to drive your own business.

Leadership and The Team

Just spotted the article, Does Your Team Have the Four Essential Types, by Adam Bryant at the New York Times website. While I normally hate any business piece that has a number in the title, I thought the part that described the personality types required on a team was interesting:

From the article:

At the risk of oversimplifying, I think that in any great leadership team, you find at least four personalities, and you never find all four of those personalities in a single person.

You need to have somebody who is a strategist or visionary, who sets the goals for where the organization needs to go.

You need to have somebody who is the classic manager — somebody who takes care of the organization, in terms of making sure that everybody knows what they need to do and making sure that tasks are broken up into manageable actions and how they’re going to be measured.

You need a champion for the customer, because you are trying to translate your product into something that customers are going to pay for. So it’s important to have somebody who empathizes and understands how customers will see it. I’ve seen many endeavors fail because people weren’t able to connect the strategy to the way the customers would see the issue.

Then, lastly, you need the enforcer. You need somebody who says: “We’ve stared at this issue long enough. We’re not going to stare at it anymore. We’re going to do something about it. We’re going to make a decision. We’re going to deal with whatever conflict we have.”

You very rarely find more than two of those personalities in one person. I’ve never seen it. And really great teams are where you have a group of people who provide those functions and who respect each other and, equally importantly, both know who they are and who they are not.

Often, I’ve seen people get into trouble when they think they’re the strategist and they’re not, or they think they’re the decision maker and they’re not. You need a degree of humility and self-awareness. Really great teams have team members who know who they are and who they’re not, and they know when to get out of the way and let the other team members make their contribution.