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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIndiana University entrepreneurship major and soon-to-be junior Elizabeth Harding has a summer job, but she’s not flipping burgers or working the phones someplace.
She’s a global analyst for Plug and Play Tech Center, a Silicon Valley-based global innovation platform that connects startups, corporations, investors and universities, and is often described as the world’s largest business incubator.
“I started as an investment intern when I was a freshman, and now I’m working as a global analyst,” Harding said. “It’s a virtual thing right now, but next summer I hope to work for Plug and Play in person, possibly in their Chicago office.”
She picked her major after scrolling through the Kelley School of Business’ academic offerings.
“I really liked the idea of entrepreneurship because I grew up watching my mom start her own business,” she said. “It inspired me to want to create something that can help others. I want to think out of the box, which is something I think I’ve learned a lot about from my classes.”
Harding’s choice to major in entrepreneurship is hardly novel these days. Acquiring a major, minor or academic certificate in the field has become so popular that the number of schools offering them has skyrocketed. According to the Kansas City, Missouri-based Kauffman Foundation, which studies and promotes entrepreneurship, there were only 104 university programs in 1975. Today, though no one has done a precise count, experts reckon such programs number in the thousands.
Indiana schools offer an interesting selection of nationally ranked options. Indiana University’s undergraduate entrepreneurship program ranks sixth, according to U.S. News & World Report. And both Ball State University and Purdue University offer programs that are among the 50 best in the country, according to the Princeton Review.
Indiana University
IU’s efforts are overseen by Donald Kuratko, executive and academic director of the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and director of the school’s Entrepreneurial Innovation Academy. He’s something of a superstar in the field, having founded Ball State University’s long-lived entrepreneurship program in 1983, before moving to IU in 2004.
Among a great many other accolades, he’s been named one of the top entrepreneurship professors in the United States by Fortune magazine.
The author of 30 books and some 200 scholarly articles, Kuratko attributes the IU program’s high standing to its devotion to research.
“We have one of the largest faculties devoted to entrepreneurship probably in the world,” he said. “For years now, we’ve been considered No. 1 in the world in entrepreneurship research. So we’re bringing the best researchers into the classroom, and the students are hearing the very best and newest material.”
Often, students pair up the school’s entrepreneurship and corporate innovation major with another business major. And since many would-be entrepreneurs might not have a solid business idea (or enough experience) to start their own companies right after graduation, they might elect to work for an established company for a while. If they do, Kuratko recommends a particular strategy to help them get more attention from potential employers.
“If you’re going to interview with a larger entity, and let’s say you’re a double major in marketing and entrepreneurship and corporate innovation, we recommend you just drop the word ‘entrepreneurship’ and put down marketing and corporate innovation as your two majors,” he said. “Companies drool over that. I’ve had many recruiters ask if we have students who are in marketing or finance but also understand innovation. I tell them I’ve got some double majors I’d like them to talk to.”
Though IU offers both a major and a minor in entrepreneurship, perhaps the most popular offering is a cross-campus customized certificate developed in conjunction with various other schools.
“It only entails three courses at Kelley and two courses at the school the student emanates from,” Kuratko said.
This sort of certificate has proven quite popular at universities around the nation, just as it has at IU, where entities ranging from the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs to the Jacobs School of Music have teamed up with Kuratko to offer them.
“The world’s changing fast, and all these different areas of study are changing as well,” he said. “Students and faculty are beginning to realize that they need this sort of training. We wanted to reach out across campus and provide that.”
Ball State University
Ball State, home of the state’s oldest entrepreneurship program, has a similar philosophy. Its Entrepreneurship Center in the Miller College of Business is ranked 46th-best of its kind in the nation by The Princeton Review and is directed by Kimberly Howe Ferguson, who was recently plucked from the business world to take the center’s helm.
“I have the requisite degrees to teach, but my value to students comes from my experience as an entrepreneur,” Ferguson said.
Since Ball State has a lot of culturally diverse, first-generation and under-resourced students, she said, the school’s overriding aspiration isn’t necessarily to produce the next tech billionaire. Instead, it’s to impart the entrepreneurial mindset to kids who might start their own business but not necessarily straight out of school. Or who might postpone that move in order to raise a family. Or who might work for an established company for a while in order to learn a business or just save money.
“We will, of course, serve the tech and innovation students that most universities are clamoring for, but give me the second-generation family businesses, the ‘little guys,’ the student who wants to start or acquire a small business,” Ferguson said.
That last strategy, acquiring a business rather than building one from the ground up, could become a particularly fertile field for budding entrepreneurs. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, roughly 12 million of the nation’s 33.2 million small businesses are owned by baby boomers. That’s roughly $1 trillion in assets controlled by people in their 60s who might be looking for someone to buy out their company so they can move to Sarasota. It’s called acquisitional entrepreneurship.
“So, an ideal student coming into this program would not only want to be an entrepreneur but would want to learn how to buy and sell a business, work inside a business, and impact it in such a way that they’re not just being told what to do but [are] moving and shaking inside that business,” Ferguson said.
Students taking Ball State’s entrepreneurship minor hail from all over campus, just as at IU.
“We have minors from fashion design, manufacturing, audiology, exercise science, architecture,” Ferguson said. “Many of the students from those degree programs may wind up owning their own businesses. Their majors give them great skill sets, but what they need to start that business is a foundation of business and entrepreneurship skills.”
Purdue University
Purdue has developed a cottage industry around spinning off research by its instructors, students and former students into new business, so it’s no surprise that the school offers a 15-hour entrepreneurship certificate. The program ranked 28th on The Princeton Review’s Top 50 list.
Established in 2005, it has benefited hugely from the presence of Discovery Park, with that campus’s startups and established businesses. The program offers more than 50 classes, and about 2,200 students participate each year.
“It’s set up to be a minor that can integrate into any major,” said Nathalie Duval-Couetil, director of Purdue’s Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program. “We have a lot of STEM students with packed schedules and rigid academic programs. So we’ve worked very hard to make sure the certificate is accessible to pretty much everyone.”
As with her peers at IU and Ball State, Duval-Couetil said dipping one’s toes into entrepreneurship can pay dividends for students majoring in pretty much any field. At Purdue, an emphasis on working in teams seems to offer the most bang for the buck.
“We have so many students who say this helped them get a job,” she said. “Often, interviewers are very interested in talking about your business development experience, or that you worked with a multidisciplinary team, rather than talking about differential equations. Companies nowadays want students who understand value and how to generate it for the organization.”
In an effort to quantify just how much of a difference the program can make, organizers have researched students who’ve been out in the world for two to five years, asking for their experiences.
“They thought they had a different mindset from their peers,” Duval-Couetil said. “They thought they got promotions faster. They thought it was helpful to be able to work with people in other disciplines.”•
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Donald Kuratko was at Ball State as a Management prof when I was there (in the dark ages). He, and the Miller School of Business, started the Entrepreneurship program while I was there. It was a new program and my husband changed his major. He learned so much about how to run a business. He has never been a business owner, but he has used the skills he learned from Dra Kuratko throughout his successful career.
OH, and Dr K was the reason I changed my major to Management. His Intro to Management class was phenomenal.
The fact that three programs in Indiana are in the top 50 is a testament to Dr K and his drive to help drive success in his students
Very disappointed that there is no mention of Ivy Tech’s Garatoni School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. It’s a fantastic program that is currently offered at 9 of the Ivy Tech campuses. Miss opportunity.