Pronetos

Next set of presentations - these focus on interactions between entrepreneurship and "others"

First up was Travis Soule, a recent alum of Wheaton College who wants to create an entrepreneurship program there, but he has to swim upstream against not just glacial college bureaucracy but also th nagging issue that so many faculty find business to be morally suspect (and entrepreneurship possibly worse!) You can imagine the discussion!

Frank Janssen & his team from the Catholic University of Louven presented their 3 year program that brings all the colleges together with teams that contain no less than 3 disciplines [e.g., law, engineering, etc.] They now have a joint class with Appalachian State -using videoconferences, etc. And... they have the full support of the school's senior management.

Third up was Terri Barreiro from StJohns/StBenedict talking about a multi-university, crosscampus entrepreneurship effort, "E-Scholars" stated at U of Portland by Robin Anderson. [Robin, I had NO idea how cool this was... ] This has clever mechanisms to get selected students, regardless of major or age or whatever, engaged locally, nationally and internationally.

Great discussion followed, with much of the focus on how do we think we are changing students' minds - and maybe we should be doing more to measure it? It was clear that entrepreneurship students generate more than enough different activities to create a portfolio of skills, experiences, etc.

Norris: Please continue blogging on the conference! We will soon have a feature set up for conference live blogging. We plan to roll that out at ASSA (Allied Social Sciences) in January. Until that time, please use the forums, and stay tuned for another set of new features out on Monday - open peer review, document versioning, expanded user profiles, etc.

We are already starting to see how Pronetos might help entrepreneurial teams work together. We've had professors from across the Atlantic collaborating on research with marketing managers, CEOs of marketing firms, and American University Professors. We're very proud to be able to facilitate introductions, communication, and interaction between global scholars and practitioners in the field.

Lastly see our mention in the Chronicle this morning. Best wishes from all of us to all of you at Wake Forest . . .

Chris Blanchard
CEO
Pronetos, Inc.

Lunch was good! LOL (www.graylyn.com. fyi)

A little back story here - Wake Forest and other schools here (e.g., FIU, Illinois, Arizona State) have funding as a "Kauffman Campus" - each campus has funding support to seed-fund educational initiatives that spread entrepreneurship across campus. Some incredible things are happening that I cannot possibly due justice to (via blogging anyway).

Anyway, kudos to the schools and these imaginative faculty and to Kauffman for their financial & moral support.

OK, session 3 started with Arizona State's crosscampus team sharing how their mental maps of entrepreneurship - its definition, what should be taught & how should it be taught. Gee, do ya think the engineer, the film professor, and the social entrepreneur had the same maps? LOL

That was followed by Christian Lendner & Jutta Huebscher from Deggendorf in Germany with a test of the impacts of using entrepreneurship simulation games. Complex results but promising!

Then it got crazy...

Biophysicist Jed Macosko showed his "BioBotz" class where students start with the video below, then create an organization to follow suit. For those who have access to animation technology & expertise.... do it!
http://www.studiodaily.com/main/technique/tprojects/6850.html

That video was a tough act follow,right? Well, biologist Dan Johnson went low-tech -- showed us how he stated a recent class. Went to the flipchart and wrote.. "I hate textbooks." The students were thrown into the task of answering the question of "What do we DO about this statement?" From there, the class was hardcore problem-based learning where the students figured out what needed to be done before figuring out ho to do it. The goal was to address a complex, possibly-impossible problem... and solve it! And as almost always happen in PBL... they do. [This was how I taught my classes - so I felt his pain. This can be a very hard sell to students and even harder sell to administrators who are used to highly-strcutured classes. This is much more than a canned case study.]

Anyway, one important recurring theme is that "hands-on" is NOT "experiential." Another that seem evident is that expertise is critical - this is not for beginners and definitely not for dilettantes, LOL.

I am truly impressed by the passion - for the student, for the community, for the learning.

Session 4 is up next...
(Claire's class is still my fave so far, but... no clunkers yet, not even close!)

The amazing work just keeps coming!

First up was Matthew Mars [we are required to call him "Matthew", much to his chagrin, LOL] from UArizona's Tech Transfer Office. They've created the "entrepreneurship-law exchange" to generate advice re intellectual property. Nice twist on the old law clinic model. [UI-Boise? Wanna try this??]

Next, Mark Weaver who just moved to LSU had recently built Rowan University's program, raising ~$16 million? [Rowan is in south Joisey.]

The theme was ambitious: Create a Truly Entrepreneurial University. And made one helluva start.

He managed to get 10 courses approved in 18 months, including a campus-wide GEN ED (core) class in entrepreneurship!

Joint classes between business, et al. and engineering design labs, including the senior engineering capstone design lab.

Basic format - yup, more true problem-basd learning.

Off to dinner, then we start again Saturday morning!

Glitch-delayed, but - as promised, here's the Saturday finale. Several wonderful presentations (plus mine, LOL)

The leaves are in mid-turning in a very leafy Wake Forest campus - don't tase me, but it was even prettier than Chapel Hill's campus. Got us revved up for the rest of the conference.

First up was music/entrepreneurship expert Gary Beckman, recently moved from UT-Austin to South Carolina.

Gary focused on the theme of "intellectual entrepreneurship" - really setting down the classical roots of what we do and how we teach. (I don't know what's scarier: Someone using the Quadrivium in a presentation or most people understanding what that means, LOL.) I really wish I could do full justice to his carefully-crafted argument of what our value can truly be to colleagues in any discipline.

The key point was that we need to be "authentic" - tied to the essence of the school's mission. If we focus on being authentic, then we have much greater ability to be instrumental in supporting that mission.

Second was yours truly who argued that we need to look at the very nature of entrepreneurial learning. What the hell ARE we doing to these poor learners?

Deep, transformative learning. Providing them with developmental experiences that changes their deep beliefs & assumptions about entrepreneurship and their role in that. Like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, we have been speaking prose our whole lives & didn't know it - i.e., almost all of our most effective training tools are constructivistic (e.g., true problem-based learning). We help them change what they know, sure, but we are really changing how they structure that knowledge & help them move toward a more expert entrepreneurial mindset. Not easy, not for amateurs - but we need to recognize this, measure its impact and... celebrate it. (Hell, this whole conference, like the WUN conf in Chicago, was a celebration.

Third up was Frank Janssen presenting a paper he did with Alain Fayolle (long a voice urging us to measure the impact of our classes). They took French engineering students and using Nicole Peterman's framework [see Peterman & Kennedy in ETP] to asses changes from even short-term programs upon intent and attitudes. Prior exposure has little impact, but there was a small impact on intent and perceived feasibility [Ajzen's PBC]

The discussion section was a blast - lots of talk about how we canb sell what we do. We can evne make the case we are truly "old school", education as it used to be [Betsy G raised the example of the British tutor system.] As with Gary's presentation, I'm not sure I can do justice to it, so I hope others will chime in!

After the final break, the final session!

Tony Mendes [at the evil U of Illinois that upset my beloved Buckeyes, LOL] shared the history of exactly how Illinois grew their crosscampus entrepreneurship effort. The key was not one, but two, arms-length stakeholder surveys/interviews to identify the opportunities and the barriers ahead. One interesting takeaway was that several faculty across campus realized they too were "speaking prose" - they were a lot more entrepreneurial than they had realized.

Tony shared a powerful story of meeting the Dean of the Grad School who did the arms-folded, looking down over the glasses pose. Tony went "gulp..." then heard him out. The upshot? At a recent National Council of Grad Schools, guess who convened a major session on crosscampus entrepreneurship? Skeptic + listening = Ally? [A damned good lesson for your humble blogger... ]

We ended with Betsy Gatewood talking about what Wake Forest has achieved -and the hurdles they've faced. (You might ask Page West about his "dialogue" with a certain campus letter-writer & for a copy of his eloquent response.)

The conference ended with a video that celebrates (and pitches) WF's program:
"Any student, any major, any year" -
we are all begging for copies, LOL - beautifully done with lots of student interviews driving the message. I do hope that at some point that will be shareable...

Final thoughts?
1) Crosscampus may be THE way to go. Crossdisciplinary not only brings out the best in students (and faculty) but it serves the school and its stakeholders.
2) As such, we ARE good for education. We have an important, unique role to play.
3) Entrepreneurship sure isn't just for b-schools any more - and maybe schools should start as crosscampus. A School of Entrepreneurship anyone?
4) The caliber of colleagues just gets better & better. Many of you have heard babble about constructivism (& cognitive change, etc.) and true problem-based learning... but to be amid a whole crew of folks who truly "get it"? Wow!

Thanks again to Wake Forest, Betsy, Page, Lisa Burton, et al. for a great, brain-filling time.

NK, Boise Idaho, 14 November 2007

Oops - I spelled Frank's school incorrectly! It is "Louvain".

Their website, btw, is http://www.uclouvain.be/cpme [note that htp://translate.google.com might be necessary. Je parle un peu de francais... un tres petit peu! LOL]

Anyway, I hope that Frank will chime in later AND others from the conference will do the same. It is so important for people to know about these amazing efforts- and maybe get an idea of what their "secret sauce" is!
/nk