Universities Race to Nurture Start-Up Founders of the Future
By NATASHA SINGER

HOUSTON — The original charter of Rice University, drafted in 1891, established a school here dedicated to the advancement of literature, science and art. These days, Rice seems equally dedicated to the advancement of the next Mark Zuckerberg.

The university offers academic courses in entrepreneurship strategy and financing, extracurricular start-up workshops and a summer program for students seeking to start companies. In August, Rice announced a multimillion-dollar “entrepreneurship initiative” to develop more courses and programs in the subject. And administrators say they hope to erect an entrepreneurial center to house classes and services supporting student projects.

“We want Rice to be one of the schools at the top of the list of schools that prospective students with entrepreneurial aspirations say would be a good place to realize their ambitions,” said David W. Leebron, Rice’s president. “This is a nontrivial group of students, some of the smartest students, the most creative students.”

Ten years ago, it may have sufficed to offer a few entrepreneurship courses, workshops and clubs. But undergraduates, driven by a sullen job market and inspired by billion-dollar success narratives from Silicon Valley, now expect universities to teach them how to convert their ideas into business or nonprofit ventures.

As a result, colleges — and elite institutions in particular — have become engaged in an innovation arms race. Harvard opened an Innovation Lab in 2011 that has helped start more than 75 companies. Last year, New York University founded a campus entrepreneurs’ lab, and this year Northwestern University opened a student start-up center, the Garage.

“Today’s students are hungry to make an impact, and we have to be responsive,” said Gordon Jones, the dean of a new College of Innovation and Design at Boise State University in Idaho and the former director of Harvard’s Innovation Lab.

Yet campus entrepreneurship fever is encountering skepticism among some academics, who say that start-up programs can lack rigor and a moral backbone.

Even a few entrepreneurship educators say that some colleges and universities are simply parroting an “innovate and disrupt” Silicon Valley mind-set and promoting narrow skill sets — like how to interview potential customers or pitch to possible investors — without encouraging students to tackle more complex problems.

“A lot of these universities want to get in the game and serve this up because it’s hot,” Mr. Jones said. “The ones that are doing it right are investing in resources that are of high caliber and equipping students to tackle problems of importance.”

In trying to develop rich entrepreneurial ecosystems, many institutions are following a playbook established years ago by Stanford and M.I.T., which involves academic courses, practical experience and an extended alumni advisory network.

Some universities are redoubling their efforts.

Princeton offers a variety of entrepreneurship courses. But, in a report released in May, a university advisory committee concluded that Princeton had fallen behind competing schools that had made “major upgrades” to their programs.

Among other issues, the report said, Princeton had allotted “only 1,500 square feet” for student incubator and accelerator programs, “whereas Cornell has 364,000; Penn 200,000; Berkeley 108,000; Harvard 30,000; Stanford 12,000; Yale 7,700; N.Y.U. 6,000; and Columbia 5,000.”

In November, Princeton celebrated the opening of a 10,000-square-foot Entrepreneurial Hub near campus. The university is also starting a summer internship program in Manhattan so that students can spend time at young companies. Mung Chiang, the director of the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education at Princeton, said the university wanted to help students, faculty and alumni become more entrepreneurial in business, government and nonprofit work.

“It’s about broadening people’s mind-sets and capabilities,” Professor Chiang said.

The growth in campus entrepreneurship is clear, administrators say. In 1985, college campuses in the United States offered only about 250 courses in entrepreneurship, according to a recent report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which finances entrepreneurship education and training. In 2013, more than 400,000 students were taking such courses.

The prospect of starting the next Snapchat or Instagram is one attraction for students. But in a tight job market, where young adults say they expect to change employers every few years, some undergraduates are signing up for start-up training in the hope of acquiring self-employment skills.

“To be honest, our generation is no longer interested in doing one thing for the rest of our lives,” said Mijin Han, a senior at Rice with an English major and a business minor focused on entrepreneurship. “Our generation is interested in learning different things, and if the environment does not provide it, we want to jump out and take a risk.”

Some of that spirit was on display at Rice in October. In an engineering department design lab, teams of students in the university’s global health technologies program were working on assignments to develop products for real clients — many of them for hospitals in Malawi, in southeastern Africa, seeking low-cost medical devices.

Across campus, a popular lunch spot was hosting a touring start-up event — financed by Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a frequent guest on the start-up reality show “Shark Tank” — that brings executives at young companies to network with students. At a nearby table, faculty members handed out cards to students that provided links to Rice’s entrepreneurship resources and emblazoned with start-up slogans: “Be a disrupter.” “Find your co-founder.” “What is your moonshot?”

To support the programs, colleges and universities are raising money and seeking mentors among successful alumni and local business leaders. Some provide stipends for students participating in accelerator programs or offer seed capital for their start-ups; others may negotiate revenue-sharing arrangements if graduate students want to commercialize ideas developed in university labs.

N.Y.U.’s 5,900-square-foot lab is financed by a multimillion-dollar gift from Mark Leslie, a university trustee who was the founder and chief executive of Veritas Software, and his wife, Debra. With plate glass windows overlooking Washington Place in Manhattan, the Leslie eLab provides space for budding entrepreneurs to network, attend events and make prototypes of their products.

“I know a few students who visited the eLab and saw the buzz and the resources we have available and said this was a critical factor in their decision to attend N.Y.U.,” said Frank Rimalovski, the executive director of the N.Y.U Entrepreneurial Institute, which oversees the lab.

Yet the quick start-up workshops offered on some campuses can seem at odds with the traditional premise of liberal arts schools to educate deliberative, critical thinkers.

“Real innovation is rooted in knowledge and durable concern and interest, not just ‘I thought of something that nobody ever thought of before,’” said Jonathan Jacobs, who writes frequently about liberal education and is the chairman of the philosophy department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York. “That’s not educating people, frankly.”

And at least a few professors of entrepreneurship say that some universities are not ensuring that students learn the fundamentals of starting, running and sustaining a business.

“Just because you have a nice space and a laundry list of entrepreneurship activities doesn’t mean there is an effective story around that program, or that students know how to navigate their way around those resources,” said Heidi Neck, a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Babson College, a business school in Wellesley, Mass.

That is one reason Rice administrators say they are consolidating and analyzing current programs before embarking on additional efforts. As part of that process, the university introduced an interdisciplinary forum last month to promote campus research, discussion and broader courses in entrepreneurship.

Mr. Leebron, Rice’s president, described the initiative as part of an effort to improve the hands-on, project-based learning students are requesting.

“There’s no question that more people at the age of 18 are coming to universities saying, ‘I have an idea; I think I can have an impact,’” he said. “What are we going to do with these folks? How are we going to support them?”

美大學拚創業 召喚下一個祖克柏

紐約時報報導，美國萊斯大學1891年起草的建校方針是致力於文學、科學和藝術的精進，但這些日子，萊斯也致力於培養下一個祖克柏。

萊斯大學提供創業策略、財務管理等創業課程，課外活動有實習創立公司的工作坊，並為想創立公司的學生開暑期進修班。不只萊斯，美國許多名校已在進行「創新軍備競賽」，紛紛成立創業家養成中心，哈佛大學2011年開設的「創新實驗室」已催生75家公司。

2014年，紐約大學創設「校園創業家實驗室」，西北大學的學生創業中心「車庫」2015年開張。蘋果已故創辦人賈伯斯就是在車庫裡創業。

10年前，各校頂多開一些創業課程、工作坊和社團。但受到就業市場不振，以及矽谷動輒幾十億美元身價的成功創業家故事影響，大學部學生期望學校教他們如何把構想變成商業或非營利事業。愛達荷州樹城州立大學新設的創新與設計學院院長鍾斯說：「今天的學生渴望有影響力，我們必須回應。」鍾斯為哈佛的「創新實驗室」前主任。

不過，這股校園創業熱潮遭到一些學術界人士質疑，他們認為一些創業課程不夠嚴謹，且缺少道德骨幹。

連一些創業教育家都說，一些大學只是模仿矽谷的創新心態，學習狹隘的技術，例如如何訪問潛在的客戶或討好潛在的投資人，卻未鼓勵學生解決更複雜的問題。

為了發展豐富的創業生態系統，許多大學遵循史丹福大學和麻省理工學院多年前建立的劇本，包涵學術課程、實際經驗和廣大的校友諮詢網。

各校競爭激烈。普林斯頓大學2015年5月發布報告，指該校只分配1500平方英尺地方給創業家養成計畫，而康乃爾大學有36萬4000平方英尺，賓州大學20萬平方英尺，柏克萊加大10萬8000平方英尺，哈佛3萬平方英尺，史丹福1萬2000，耶魯7700，紐約大學6000，哥倫比亞大學5000。

2015年11月，普林斯頓為學校附近1萬平方英尺的「創業中心」揭幕，並展開在紐約曼哈坦區的實習計畫，學生可以在一些新創公司裡實習。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/technology/universities-race-to-nurture-start-up-founders-of-the-future.html

2016-01-01．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯田思怡